The original tabloid tale
by Tom Keogh

added on 3/31/96

The precise spot in Victoria Park, New Zealand's pastoral resort attraction, where teenagers Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker murdered the latter's mother in the winter of 1952 feels cursed to this day, says filmmaker Peter Jackson.

He ought to know. Jackson is the Wellington-born director of "Heavenly Creatures," a new film about the bizarre but nearly-forgotten Hulme-Parker affair, which culminated in the shocking act of matricide. In press interviews, Parker has said the actual site of the killing is so oddly devoid of birds and flowers he chose to shoot his grisly reenactment of the event a short distance away.

A similarly forbidden aura surrounds much of the earthly and psychological terrain of "Heavenly Places." Drawing upon written accounts, fresh testimony, and the diaries of 15-year-old Pauline, the film traces an obsessive relationship between wildly dissimilar but equally lonely young women, from their first meeting at a strict school in Christchurch, New Zealand. Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), the daughter of boarding house owners, is a sullen, dowdy girl with no friends. Juliet (Kate Winslet), a well-traveled English visitor, is well-spoken and graceful but hardly noticed by her scholarly parents.

The two form an attachment born of intense imagination, a love of writing, and youthful uncertainty about sex. Juliet and Pauline decide to become "novelists," collaborating on long, intricate texts about a fantastic place they call the Fourth World, as well as a medieval kingdom called Borovnia, where kings and queens dwell among courtly lovers.

When Juliet is overcome by tuberculosis and abandoned by her vacationing parents, the intimacy between she and Pauline intensifies all the more. Fearing that the girls have gone too far, various adults attempt to maneuver them apart. Nothing works -- if anything, the pair become more hysterical and despairing about the real world with each passing day. Convincing themselves that Pauline's mother's growing disapproval is an obstacle to their freedom, Juliet and Pauline plot the course of events that will forever change their lives.

Part of what makes "Heavenly Creatures" instantly intriguing, of course, is its revived tabloid appeal more than 40 years after its story takes place. Recent reports that Juliet lives somewhere in England today as a successful, Victorian-mystery novelist writing under the name of Anne Perry can't help but send chills up the spine. Pauline, according to a reporter who recently tracked her down, has been working in obscurity at an Auckland bookstore.

But Jackson will have none of that voyeurism. His movie is much more inspired by the fantastic undercurrent of the girls' bond than in the tale's obvious sensationalism.

Jackson, until now a cult director popular on the film festival circuit, pulls out all the stops getting inside Pauline and Juliet's head games. With the aid of state-of-the-art visual effects, nightmarish make-up, and disorienting camera work, Jackson turns the movie screen into a playground for the girls' fever dreams. The small, clay models Juliet and Pauline make to represent characters in their fictional castle become full-size, clay people in a beautiful palace. The palace itself appears miraculously on a lush plain.

Jackson's method owes something to Monty Python's Terry Gilliam, whose eye-popping "Brazil" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" collapsed layers of myth, historical fantasy, and retro art direction onto one another. But Jackson lacks Gilliam's sense of design and balance. "Heavenly Creatures" is so operatic, so deliberately over-the-top, that the film can shove viewers away rather than -- as Jackson hopes to do -- pull them in. There is so much vertiginous cinematography, so much wooshing and whirling around to suggest the storm unleashed from Juliet and Pauline's psyches that one wants to shout at Jackson to take it down several notches.

But just as a storm passes, the excesses of "Heavenly Creatures" are soon forgotten, and all that is left is a feeling that something in the air has profoundly changed. Performances, particularly, linger in the memory: novice actress Lynskey's slow revelation of the tragic, terrifying forces just under Pauline's overgrown-moppet surface, and the brittle regality and danger of the more seasoned Winslet's Juliet. Together, these two inspired performers do more to communicate Jackson's horror than all the film's special effects -- the horror of a dream from which one can't awaken