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‘Heavenly creatures’ are hellish murderers

By Daily Bruin Staff

Nov. 22, 1994 9:00 p.m.

‘Heavenly creatures’ are hellish murderers

Writer-director Jackson frightens, yet beguiles in film

By Lael Loewenstein

Daily Bruin Staff

On a crisp June day in 1954, New Zealand girls Juliet Hulme, 15,
and Pauline Parker, 16, sat down to tea with Pauline’s mother, went
for a walk in the woods and bludgeoned her to death with a brick.
Their motive? She had threatened to keep them apart.

That shocking true story and the events leading up to it form
the basis for Heavenly Creatures, the bold and breathtaking new
film from writer-director Peter Jackson.

Defying genre conventions, Heavenly Creature is equal parts love
story, melodrama, fantasy, and horror, adding up to a chillingly
original film. That the story is true is horrific enough in itself,
and the film feels authentic thanks to the lengthy historical
research that Jackson and co-writer Frances Walsh conducted. It
seems even more chilling because the actresses who play Juliet and
Pauline (Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey) imbue their roles with
so much life that it becomes almost impossible to look at a
teen-age girl in the same way again.

We meet Juliet and Pauline running through the woods, shrieking,
laughing and crying. In what portends of the audacious
cinematography to follow, the camera tracks their every move, their
wild unrestraint. And when the girls stop running, we see that they
are covered in blood.

Having piqued the audience’s curiosity with that bizarre opening
­ in effect, beginning at the end ­ Jackson then retraces
the events that preceded it, using entries from Pauline’s actual
diary for narration.

When mousy, introverted, Pauline meets her striking new British
classmate Juliet at school one day, they begin an impassioned
alliance. Bonding over their shared illnesses, their love of opera
singer Mario Lanza, and their vivid imagination, they experience
the kind of all-encompassing friendship that comes naturally to
adolescent girls.

Passion drives their friendship ­ for their fantasy world
of Borovnia with its life-size clay figures, for their matinee
idols, and above all for each other. Eventually that same passion
envelopes them. Is it a lesbian affection? We’re never quite sure,
and the director, to his credit, leaves that question open.

Jackson uses his camera as creatively as Juliet and Pauline use
their minds, racing through a sandcastle at top speed, watching the
countryside metamorphose into a paradisal garden, terrorizing the
girls with the ghost of Orson Welles.

We are so deeply immersed in the girls’ world and our
identification with them is so complete that when Pauline’s mother,
fearing an "unnatural" attachment, plans to separate them, their
desperation makes sense. And when they plot the crime, it seems, in
their own warped logic, to be their only way of staying
together.

Carefully, gradually building suspense and atmosphere, Jackson
presents the girls’ buildup to the murder ­ "the happy day,"
according to Pauline’s diary ­ like two expert terrorists
planning an attack.

Juliet and Pauline were so consumed with the commission of their
crime that they failed to envision its consequences. When the
police read Pauline’s diary, they immediately targeted the killers.
The girls went to jail and were released five years later on the
condition that they never meet again.

Inspired, compelling and fully realized, Heavenly Creatures is
as frightening as it is beguiling, much like the girls
themselves.

FILM: Heavenly Creatures. Written by Frances Walsh and Peter
Jackson. Directed by Peter Jackson. Starring Melanie Lynskey and
Kate Winslet. Opens today.

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