Family Secrets : In her films New Zealand director Jane Campion explores her obsession with the unconscious by looking at interactions in the home

Like Janus, the two-faced Roman God of beginnings and endings, Jane Campion has two faces of her own. There’s the social Jane--all smiles and levity and yearnings to be loved. And then there’s the Jane of her films--dark and probing and provocative and bold--a woman more easily confused with David Lynch and Flannery O’Connor than with Jane Pauley.

Most of the time, the New Zealand-born director juggles her two faces without much psychological strain. But when the burghers of Cannes nearly ripped off her head when her film “Sweetie” premiered at last year’s festival, Campion recalls, she considered junking her dark artist’s face for good.

“I really lost a lot of confidence,” Campion muses about the hordes of critics who reviled “Sweetie.” One called it a “dankly disagreeable perversion.” Many journalists at Cannes rushed to cancel interview sessions with Campion that they had scheduled before they saw the film. Those who out of courtesy went through with the interviews found the 36-year-old director crushed and nearly catatonic.

“It was terribly alarming that people felt such aggression at what seemed to me a very compassionate film, oddly told I grant you, but humorous and such a little film. People around me said it was great that it stirred up all this talk and debate. But I would have preferred some universal enjoyment of it.

“It’s taken some time but that experience helped me to realize this schizophrenic thing--that there is a difference between my social personality that wants to be friendly with everyone and well liked, and the work that I do, which is probing and daring and the side of me that doesn’t get satisfied with all that social stuff. I want my work to be that way. There aren’t enough films that are provocative. But I wasn’t ready for that hostility. I took it personally, and I really did not feel like continuing.”

The fact that Campion’s quirky debut went on to glowing reviews and art-house popularity when it was released in the United States buoyed the director’s spirits. Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it “a spectacular film debut . . . a movie quite unlike any other you’re likely to see until the next Campion comes along.” The Los Angeles Times’ Sheila Benson raved that “with a postmodernist eye and a brilliant satiric ear, ‘Sweetie’ is the announcement of a singular, smashing talent.”

But what saved her from possibly another career, Campion says, was that she was already locked into directing her newest film, “An Angel at My Table,” a gentle and rather uplifting film biography of Janet Frame, one of New Zealand’s most renowned authors. Campion originally made it as a three-part miniseries for New Zealand and Australian television. When investors pressed her to release it theatrically, she agreed to test it first at the Sydney (Australia) Film Festival, where, Campion says, the entire audience started looking at her “with this bizarre loving glow. It was the most popular film at the festival. And we had distributors all over us.”

The film also wooed audiences in January at the Venice Film Festival, where it won seven prizes and Campion received standing ovations from the assembled press corps.

“People I guess are now saying, ‘It’s good to see you’ve improved your ways, that you’ve grown up and found your mature voice,’ ” Campion quips, punctuating her sarcasm with a hearty laugh and a toothy smile. “You can really see how mad it all is. If you run your life on those opinions, you’re really in trouble.”

“An Angel at My Table,” which opens here Friday, is a far more conventional and accessible work than “Sweetie” or any of the short film “experiments” Campion made while at film school in Australia (the eight-minute “Peel” won the award for best short film at the 1986 Cannes festival). But at more than 150 minutes and with a lyrical style that often overlays elliptical scene upon scene to build the life of the novelist, “Angel” is no “Home Alone” or even “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

Adapted by screenwriter Laura Jones from Frame’s own autobiographical trilogy, Campion’s film version of the first 40 years of Frame’s life is merely the three nights of “non-commercial” TV, minus about 10 minutes of repetitive narrative, shown as one. Campion first read Frame’s “Owls Do Fly” at age 13. “I grew up with Janet’s fiction and was familiar with her legend as New Zealand’s mad writer. Everyone thought her novels were the direct result of her supposed schizophrenia. But then I found that the three autobiographies painfully unravel this myth, and I wanted to make her work more widely available.”

“Angel” is in turn both charming and chilling. Audiences delight when Campion recalls Frame’s pudgy childhood, spying on her eldest sister’s supposedly furtive adolescent sex in the woods and then tattling to their father in a hilariously raucous scene at the family dinner table. And they wince in horror when Campion depicts the terror of suffering through 200 separate electroshock “treatments” by simply showing Frame huddled in the corner of her mental hospital bed while the electroshock equipment is wheeled from patient to patient in plain view. (Frame, who because of her extraordinary shyness and sensitivity was wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic, was saved from an experimental lobotomy in the early 1950s only because a book of her stories won a prestigious literary prize.)

For those who loved rather than loathed “Sweetie,” “Angel” is likely to be less of a revelation. The director is far less here. While “Sweetie’s” off-kilter compositions, awkward close-ups and strategic use of grotesque details inspired one critic to write that “ ‘Sweetie’ makes suburban shabbiness seem hallucinatory,” “Angel,” on the other hand, has been described as “tender,” “straightforward,” “discreet” and “unpretentious.”

Campion insists that the “Sweetie” backlash did not seduce her into abandoning her brash methods. Being true to Frame’s story, she says, required that she adopt the visage of a simple storyteller.

“Janet’s story is very emotionally based, and I felt that to be real theoretical about it or to make it a vehicle for my own quirky style was to disempower her story,” Campion explains. “It’s not a signature piece. It’s a story that I loved, and I was happy just to be a loving and honest custodian for it.

“When I was writing ‘Sweetie’ I was looking for a way to present a different kind of style, to continue the experiments begun in the shorts. And I am committed to experimenting further. But I enjoyed doing Janet Frame because it destroyed the opportunity for people to categorize me. And it’s true to me. I really do have a part of me that can communicate widely.”

Still, “Angel” mines much of the same emotional and thematic territory Campion has explored previously: family, the artistic temperament, sex, madness, superstitions and the unconscious mind. The first section of the film chronicles the childhood relationships and incidents--as well as the plump, frizzy-haired child’s own intuitive take on them--that led her to seek refuge in her imagination.

“Sweetie” too is all about family, childhood grievances, battles of will, schizophrenia and dysfunction carried to its uncensored, dangerous extreme. “Peel” is a goofy nine-minute battle of wills over a discarded orange peel that ends in an absurd family stalemate. Campion’s 1984 half-hour film “A Girl’s Own Story” is also a disjointed but affectionate rumination on the perils of family relations--dedicated by the director “to my parents, the Beatles and the spirit of the ‘60s in which I grew up”--centered around puberty, parents who won’t speak directly to one another, Catholic school and incest.

Not that Campion’s own New Zealand childhood included similar incidents of dysfunction and tragedy, she said. It contained “the usual amount” of family drama, but Campion said that she grew up middle class, the daughter of two parents who worked in theater. She spent a great deal of time living on a country farm and riding horses.

Campion discovered film while studying painting at art school in Sydney. All of her films before “Angel,” including “Sweetie,” were made in Australia, although she has moved back to New Zealand.

Her obsession with the unconscious, superstition and mental illness, she says, originates in her own “frustration” with having a social, friendly self that has been trained to chat and smile with people while suppressing many of her real emotions and baser, supposedly inappropriate instincts. And the way to explore the relationship between a person’s social and unconscious selves, she believes, is through their family.

“I think it’s all just my general curiosity about people and how I came to be the way I am and how I came to feel the way I feel. The dynamism in family relationships is really fascinating to me, both the cruelty and the love. I’m curious about what a human being is, almost in an anthropological way. I just don’t think there is much more to worry about in life.”

Which is why, Campion says, she has so little regard for the Hollywood studios and their obsession with money. While Campion says that she admires American filmmakers such as David Lynch, Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, she calls most American films “pathetic” and the box-office-driven, cookie-cutter system that produces them “bankrupt.”

She admits that she rails against “Hollywood” mostly as an outsider and an avid and often disappointed moviegoer. She hasn’t yet made any official attempts to enter the American studio system, but she has met many American producers and studio executives on visits here and at film festivals around the world. She has also often appeared with many producers, both American and Australian, on academic panels organized to discuss the current state of film making.

“All these people talk about is money,” Campion observes. “They never talk about ideas. It’s like going to an art gallery with someone and all they talk about is how much each painting is worth. ‘This one is worth $6 million, it’s a Picasso; and this Rembrandt here is the most expensive painting.’ All these guys have so much anxiety about how Joe Blow on the street is reacting to their film. They screen the film before research audiences who have their fingers on a button that they press when they see a boring bit and another when they see an exciting bit. Their whole lives are centered around Joe Blow and his button.

“And for a large audience, they are providing a service. I mean McDonald’s makes the same hamburger over and over and people eat it up. But it’s important to remember that while the biggest group will go see ‘Ghost,’ there are lots of other people out there with all sorts of tastes. In Hollywood, unfortunately, it has become a sort of fascist system where this one big group is dictating what will be made for everyone.”

Campion concedes that the modest worldwide success of “Sweetie” and “Angel at My Table” has earned her the rare privilege of casting stones at Hollywood without any financial consequences. She is soon to begin production on her next project in New Zealand on a budget of $7 million--more than three times the money spent on her previous films--even though the film industry in her native country is “in trouble,” she says, with few projects able to attract investors.

She doesn’t begrudge acclaimed Australian directors such as Peter Weir, who has made “Green Card” and “Dead Poets Society” for Disney, their choice to direct films for big American studios in an effort to reach a much larger audience. While she would relish working on a quirky independent film in the United States, Campion says she is unlikely ever to be willing to relinquish as much artistic control as big studios like Disney usually demand.

For in today’s film climate, it’s difficult to imagine anyone walking into a Hollywood executive’s office and pitching, much less selling, something like Campion’s next film: described by the director in one-line, Hollywood-high-concept terms as “a portrait of erotic love, told in the Gothic romance tradition of Tennyson and the Bronte sisters.”

“I believe that there really should be room for provocative cinema,” she says. “And as long as I’m in a position to create an alternative, as long as I can give people another choice, I have to do it.”