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Murder and obsession in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures” | Review

In the 1950s, two teenagers blur fantasy and reality in an obsessive bond, culminating in the murder of one of their mothers. An enigmatic and visionary film.

Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Director: Peter Jackson

by Stella Bruzzi

The 1950s. Two blood-spattered schoolgirls run into the garden of a suburban house, crying out, “Mother’s terribly hurt.” The true story of how Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme got to this traumatic point begins in 1953, with Juliet’s first day at Christchurch Girls’ High School. Pauline, a native New Zealander who has been at the school some time, is a loner until she is put with Juliet, a new girl from England. Despite their very different backgrounds, the two strike up an immediate and exclusive rapport. They are linked by their childhood illnesses, their adulation of the tenor Mario Lanza, and the fantasy world they create together: the non-Christian Fourth World of “music, art, and pure enjoyment.”

For Christmas, Pauline is given a diary in which she documents her life with Juliet and the imaginative realm of the “novel” that they embark on together. The mythical Borovnia, a medieval tale of King Charles and Queen Debora, soon consumes their real existence. When they discover, as Juliet puts it, the “key” to the Fourth World, the extra part of the human brain that only ten people possess, this is where they escape to as fantasy and actuality become interchangeable.

At school one day, Juliet is rushed to a clinic to be treated for a recurrence of her TB. Despite their daughter’s illness, the Hulmes spend the summer months in England, leaving Juliet alone. Separated for two months, Juliet and Pauline write to each other as Charles and Debora, and when Pauline is allowed to visit, she tells her that John, the student lodging in her house, is madly in love with her. Despite Juliet’s protestations that this has broken her heart, Pauline allows John into her bed, only to be discovered by her father, who throws him out. However, she later loses her virginity to John.

On their return to New Zealand, Juliet’s parents begin to sense that the friendship with Pauline may be unhealthy. The girls’ time together is rationed, and Pauline is sent to a psychiatrist. Due to the separation from Juliet, Pauline’s schoolwork suffers. She decides to train as a typist, but meanwhile the two plot their escape to Hollywood where they hope to sell the rights to their novel. Juliet finds her mother in bed with another man, precipitating divorce proceedings from her father. It is decided that Juliet will stay with South African relatives. The girls’ anguish at the prospect of separation reaches hysterical proportions. Pauline stops speaking to her parents, and Juliet begs for Pauline to be allowed to go with her to South Africa. As compensation, Pauline is permitted to stay at the Hulmes’ house; the girls sleep together and plan the murder of Honora, Pauline’s mother. When the day arrives, the girls take Honora out to a local park where they hit her repeatedly over the head with a brick.

Captions tell us that the girls were found guilty of murder in what came to be known as the Parker-Hulme affair. They were released in 1959 on the condition that they never met again.

* * *

When she arrives at Christchurch High School, Juliet is brought into Pauline’s French class, superciliously eyeing a sea of pupils with cardboard name tags tied around their necks – a penchant of the mistress who makes her classes use French names rather than their own. This kooky small-town 50s, with its obsolete rituals and garish pastel shades, forms the backdrop for what is essentially an exploration of the captivating and bizarre world of that even kookier phenomenon, the imaginative, pubescent schoolgirl. Like Tom Kalin’s Swoon, Peter Jackson‘s film abandons the conventional investigative route and approaches a true-life murder case via the obsessive, private relationship between its central characters. Juliet and Pauline shroud themselves in a world of ritual and fantasy which increasingly severs its ties with the conformity of what lies outside, eventually repositioning 50s Christchurch as one of the characters in their jointly conceived novel. Juliet and Pauline, the self-designated Heavenly Creatures of the title, script their own rites of passage, from kneeling at an altar to worship-worthy men to solemnly burning their Mario Lanza record collection on a funeral pyre after hitting upon the idea of killing off Honora.

Heavenly Creatures is a beautifully choreographed descent into the realm of the personal and therefore (to an outsider) the inexplicable. Initially, we observe with curious detachment as the girls strip down to their underwear and dance around trees to a lush Lanza soundtrack proclaiming, “She’s the one for me”; but we are then jolted into their ‘Fourth World’, the real hills dissolving into their ornamental fantasy paradise. Such literalising of characters’ fantasy worlds can have embarrassing results, as it did in Sirens, which made one wish that people never allowed their deepest sexual desires to surface at all. What disciplines the excesses of Heavenly Creatures is that the subconscious sequences are always clearly located within the teenage imaginations that concoct them; they’re not some abstract, ashamedly adult vision of what Peter Jackson might assume constitutes dreamland.

It’s significant, for instance, that Borovnia surfaces in both everyday life and the life of fantasy. In one evocative scene, Juliet and Pauline – as Charles and Debora – are going through the birth of their son in the prosaic setting of Juliet’s bedroom, a scene reminiscent of many a childish piece of role-playing. Scenes such as this (and the use of Pauline’s diary entries as voice-over) ground the more outrageous flights of fancy into the animated Borovnia, a medieval castle populated by plasticine figures. Perhaps most compelling and disquieting are the sequences in which the two worlds collide, as when Juliet imagines a figure decapitating a visiting vicar.

Whereas most films that deal with the relationship between the real and the unconscious (from Spellbound to Sirens) never lose sight of the dividing line between the two, Heavenly Creatures dwells on the smudging of those boundaries. The film’s most intense, lyrical, and absurd moment comes near the end, when Juliet mouths along to a Lanza aria, as a monochrome sequence shows her family united and happy. Although the film assiduously avoids making any definite comment about the girls’ morality, their sanity, or their motivation for the killing, such scenes capture the strange euphoric loneliness of their world of sword-bearers, matinee idols, and self-glorification. As the girls repeatedly pummel Honora on the head, the vibrantly coloured violence is intercut with more black and white, now showing Juliet on a ship, joyously cocooned between her parents and waving to Pauline on the quayside. These are the last shots of the film, which ends therefore not with a neat return to where it began, but with an enigmatic, elliptical allusion to an emotional and psychological turmoil that remains unresolved.

This single idealised image sums up the strange sense of distance which pervades Heavenly Creatures: a distance which extends beyond the obvious separation between reality and fantasy, to touch on such diverse things as Pauline’s detached third-person diary descriptions of “these lovely two” or the way in which the camera, although often showing the girls in extreme close-up, always gives the impression of observing, of trying to understand but never quite getting there. Accompanying the details of the girls’ sentence and subsequent release is Lanza’s rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, at once poignant and puzzling. For all its sensuousness, its detail and its affection, Heavenly Creatures leaves Juliet and Pauline as mysterious as they were at the beginning. Although difficult to attribute, this is somehow the source of the film’s brilliance; without casting judgment over the girls’ actions, it never seeks to explain them. After Pauline and Juliet sleep together, the diary entry refers to “the joy of that thing called sin”, which could be read as being specifically about sex or about everything besides. The whole film is a breathtaking blend of the particular and the opaque, a deft juggling act with the two undefinable notions of joy and sin.

Sight and Sound, February 1995

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