Speaking of Jane Campion, who won an Oscar for _The
Power of the Dog_ ... I don't have Netflix but decided
to rewatch _Portrait of a Lady_ for the occasion. I
remembered very little of it. (Mostly that it used snippets
of Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" quartet, not very
successfully. The slow movement has so many tonal and
pacing shifts it is all but impossible to use as a film
score.) The film features some of my favorite actors
-- Mary Louise Parker, Martin Donovan, even Valentina
Cervi (who is admittedly a guilty pleasure) -- but I
couldn't make it past the 8th minute. This is damning
since I have let very bad movies stream in the background,
hardly paying attention, while I work on another computer.

After some reflection, I decided what offended me was
the disastrous prologue, which I had completely forgotten.
It features a procession of youngish women in the woods,
seemingly non-professionals (non-actors) all, looking
straight at the camera while voiceovers about their
kissing experience irritate the audience. It is like
Campion's version of a "Lands End" clothing catalog
commercial (complete with token non-white and apparently
lesbian representation thrown in). It is a transparently,
ruinously tribal self-identification moment, made worse
by the fact that the film is an adaptation of early Henry
James, who wrote old-fashioned omniscient narrator novels
and saw into the souls of his characters. Some of them
were pure of heart, some were wicked. In Campion's
prologue, none of this matters. All is surface; what
really counts is whether you belong to the Tribe.

After the prologue, Nicole Kidman shows up with a carrot
top haircut, and she holds my attention for all of two
minutes. Not the most expressive actress to begin with,
her effort at acting is doomed by the long prologue
which emphasizes that she is really posing.

And I suddenly realized this poser-syndrome must be why
Campion has come off as such a poor director of actresses.
Other woman directors generally excel at this task; not
Campion. The worst example may be _Bright Star_, where
Abbie Cornish wears the same "I swallowed a bug from
the salad table" expression in every scene. (Except when
she has to affect an embarrassing swooning expression
any time she intones even Keats' least convincing verses.)
Cornish shot to art-house stardom in Cate Shortland's
_Somersault_. Her Hollywood career has more lows than
highs, but it must be hard to find a film of hers more
unwatchable than _Bright Star_. Is _Bright Star_
Campion's worst outing, surpassing her infamous, toxic
zero-sum identity politics extravaganza "Top of the
Lake"? Even mainstream critics are openly criticizing
Campion's strident tribal instincts now. There are plenty
of good reasons for feminist/LGBTQ advocates to be
angry at the world right now, and one understands the
urge to "get even." But getting even is the the domain
of escapism of lawyers. Campion has the soul of a
divorce attorney; she will never attain the rank of a
first-rate artist.