Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Starring – Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse, Diana Kent
Director – Peter Jackson
Genre – Biopic/Crime/Drama/Fantasy
Certificate – 18 (violence/sexual content)
Running time – 98 minutes
Price – Video £8.99 (DVD not available in UK)

The plot revolves around the lives of two New Zealand teenagers living in Christchurch in 1953/54. Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) is an inmate of a repressive girl’s school where Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet) is the new girl, having recently arrived in the country from England. The pair are instantly drawn to one another, the submissive and lonely Pauline attracted by Juliet’s exuberant confidence, whilst Juliet finds an empathy with someone who, like her, has spent a lot of their childhood in hospital. Seeing Pauline’s scar from her operation for osteomyelitis, Juliet exclaims “all the best people have had chest and bone disease! It's frightfully romantic!". In the early part of the film, the friendship is simply out of a need for one another, as each fills a gap in the other’s life that neither classmates nor parents seem to notice. The friendship is carefree and whimsical, and the girls take pleasure in creating a fantasyland for themselves, about which they write detailed stories and paint pictures that reveal an intelligence and creativity about both girls.

Kate Winslet (in what I am convinced is her best ever performance) and Melanie Lynskey work together very well to create a believable relationship that conveys the lesbian undercurrents that are clearly present in the film, without using them for shock value. Yes, such a relationship was thought shocking in their society – even to the extent that Pauline is taken to a child psychologist by her worried mother – but this issue is not the in-your-face grandstand that some directors might have made it. The counter theme running through the film demonstrating the unease with which the outside world view Pauline and Juliet, and the unstable psychology at the heart of their bond is actually the most important influence on their actions, and it is this that quite rightly overrides the element of homosexuality. From inside their relationship, the girls see themselves as normal in perspective to those around them, and they are completely dependent on each other; it is this dependence more than their love that drives them to want to stay together. It is quite a remarkable feat that two men could have written a script centred on the relationship between two adolescent girls and kept it quite so convincing.

Given this material, it would have been terribly easy for the writers to end up with a film in which the two girls are seen as little more than being “stark raving mad” as Pauline so neatly puts it. It would also have been tempting to exploit the story by including sweeping moral platitudes about Pauline and Juliet’s actions or putting it in a package clearly labelled “wholesale condemnation”. However, Heavenly Creatures does none of these things, and this is perhaps where the brilliance of the film lies. The film focuses not on the end result of their actions, not on their viciousness and possible psychopathy, but rather on the events that lead up to their crime, trying to provide an explanation for what happened and create an understanding of, a connection to and possibly even a sympathy for Pauline and Juliet. That is not to say Heavenly Creatures attempts to condone their actions, it simply wants to provide a reason – and it does so superbly.

A very highly recommended film.