The nomination of Jane Campion for best director at the 2022 Academy Awards – her second, following her 1994 nomination for The Piano – is more noteworthy for what it says about the institution than for its validation of the 67-year-old director, absent from feature film-making for more than a decade.
To date, only two women – Kathryn Bigelow and Chloé Zhao – have ever won best director. If that sounds unreasonable, consider this: in 93 years, just seven women have even been nominated for the award – Lina Wertmüller in 1977 (for Seven Beauties), Campion in 1994, Sofia Coppola in 2003 (for Lost in Translation), Bigelow in 2010 (for The Hurt Locker), Greta Gerwig in 2018 (for Lady Bird), Emerald Fennell in 2021 (for Promising Young Woman) and Zhao that same year, victorious with Nomadland. For the first half-century of the awards, double-X chromosomes and the ability to successfully oversee a motion picture were apparently believed to be irreconcilable. (Something to consider the next time the rightwing media complains about Hollywood’s liberal bias.)
Yet Campion owes her career to Europe, not the US. Unusually for an Anglophone film-maker, she’s very much a creation of the Cannes film festival. Championed by one of its scouts, the late Pierre Rissient, and enthusiastically welcomed by former festival director Gilles Jacob, her first short film, Peel, premiered there in 1982 and won the short film Palme d’Or. Two further shorts, Passionless Moments (1983) and A Girl’s Own Story (1984), each screened in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section, and by 1989, she’d graduated to Competition with her debut feature, Sweetie. Just four years later, she became the first female film-maker to win the Palme d’Or, for The Piano.
In 2014 Campion was invited to chair the festival’s jury, and at that year’s closing ceremony, when the then-83-year-old Jacob presented the award for the Camera d’Or, he invited her to stand beside him at the podium. “Jane,” he said quietly, “you know what you mean to me.”
This could seem anecdotal, but what Cannes did with that early endorsement proved foundational in two ways. Firstly, it bolstered Campion’s faith in her own artistic sensibility. “When I went to Cannes,” she told Richard Peña, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “I thought, ‘Oh, I can go on doing this.’” And secondly, it helped reintroduce antipodean cinema to the wider world, giving it a profile lacking since the early-70s heyday of the Australian New Wave.
That she was a woman in what was then (and many would argue, still remains) a male-dominated enclave, only added to her mysterious sense of otherness. It’s worth noting that when she did win the Palme d’Or – which she shared with Chen Kaige for Farewell My Concubine – she was one of only two women among the 23 film-makers in Competition. (The other, oddly enough, was another Australian: the now much-missed Laurie McInnes.)
Campion has, in short, had to fight for a seat at the table. Yet somehow she has managed to achieve it without sacrificing any of the qualities that make her unique. It’s all too easy, in all this reverent talk of her achievements, to overlook what a genuinely odd film-maker Campion is. Her fascination with aberrant behaviour, with the tactility of objects, with fetishistic tokens, is entirely her own. Hers is an unabashedly sensual cinema, impressionistic and frequently ambiguous – and the results are rewarding and frustrating in equal measures.
Hollywood and Campion, therefore, were always going to be a difficult match. And after meeting the industry very much on her own terms with The Piano, she then attempted, with various degrees of success, to conform to the template of Respected Commercial Film-maker. Her 1996 film The Portrait of a Lady, based on one of Henry James’ best-loved novels and boasting some A-list stars (Nicole Kidman, John Malkovich, John Gielgud), looked at face value to be a classy high-lit adaptation à la Howard’s End or The Age of Innocence. In fact, it was a feverish deconstruction, almost postmodern in its treatment of character and incident. Some of it worked, much of it didn’t – but the sheer audacity of her approach is hard to deny.
In the Cut, made seven years later, was even stranger. Adapting an erotic thriller by Susanna Moore, Campion twisted the material into ever-more-unconventional shapes, abstracting the narrative and ignoring genre conventions in order to better interrogate power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, and examine the sometimes murky nature of consent. The result, however, delighted almost no one – watching, you get the sense that she considered herself better than the material – and its commercial and critical failure marked the end of her initial flirtation with Hollywood.
On the face of it, The Power of the Dog looks like an outlier in her filmography: an American sort-of western (never mind that it was shot in her native New Zealand) and her first film with male protagonists. In fact, it feels entirely congruent with the others. Campion’s worldview is reflexively feminist, however much she might deny the affiliation (“I dislike club mentality of any kind, even feminism,” she told director Katherine Dieckmann back in 2012, “though I do relate to the purpose and point of feminism”), yet she specialises in creating distinctly anti-feminist worlds for her characters to inhabit. Early colonial New Zealand, 1880s Rome, rural Montana in the 1920s … none of these milieus are exactly sympathetic to the cause of gender equality. Nevertheless, Campion’s heroines – and her (anti-)heroes – occupy them, and attempt by way of design and simple persistence to bend them to their will.
One can hardly put much faith in the Oscars to get things right: this is, after all, the august body that pronounced Green Book the finest film of 2018. And the best director category remains very much a lottery: that Kenneth Branagh should be nominated for Belfast while first-timer Maggie Gyllenhaal goes unrewarded for The Lost Daughter (in my opinion, a better film than The Power of the Dog, and an even stronger display of directorial prowess) seems to me little short of science-fictional.
But whatever the result on 27 March, the tide has turned. There’s no shortage of gifted female film-makers working right now, in the US, Europe, across Latin America and the Middle East. And one way or another, they all owe Campion a debt. The door was closed for too long, and she – talented and raw-nerved, impatient with conventional pieties – helped kick it open.
