Heavenly Creatures
directed by Peter Jackson
starring Melanie Lynskey, Kate Winslet, Sarah Peirse...
This is only a selection of the credits. To me everybody who has worked on Heavenly Creatures should be acknowledged for it but then this page would have burst because of the incoming of too much HC-information:)
Be sure however to check my small-because-selective HC-gallery.

While Peter Jackson was going out of his way to have Kate Winslet look astonishinlgy beautiful in Heavenly Creatures, her co-star Melanie Lynskey had the very tricky responsibility of also being the voice-over telling most of the story. This was indeed a tough job, for had the audience hated her voice and the film would never have worked so well. Even though Melanie is not always onscreen, her voice is always present in the viewer's mind as the storyteller bringing the audience into the Fourth World.

But Melanie was not only this, she played the protagonist of the story, for by presenting Heavenly Creatures from the point of view of Pauline (and taking it to be that of the two girls, as if they were one soul) Peter Jackson goes for her fantasy the whole way. After all Anne Perry does claim none of this happened the way it was portrayed in Heavenly Creatures, and maybe even Juliet's diaries (which according to persistent rumours were destroyed by Bill Perry just before the arrest) presented quite a different view of the relationship and what it was leading to.

By having Kate Winslet look so superiorly beautiful Peter Jackson created a distance between her and the audience: we feel she is far too high for us mortals (no pun intended - alright, a little) - and again, this is the vision Pauline herself had of Juliet, and only by becoming her friend Juliet brought Pauline to those higher spheres with her. With Melanie it is quite the opposite: although she doesn't seem common - such nose-wrinkling sets her apart anyway - she looks like the deeply interesting girl that no one ever talks to, and who could very well be our best friend, if only we weren't so stupid to let her alone.

In a way Pauline (and by extension Melanie Lynskey (yeah, yeah, I know, never mix character and actor), who has remained widely unkown outside her underground fans from the Internet) belongs to the real world like the audience, while Juliet (Kate Winslet, who keeps moving from the cover of one glossy mag to another) is part of a higher universe which you can only reach in your wildest dreams, if reality doesn't catch you on the way and make it all a nightmare where your dreams collapse and fade away at the blow of a brick.

In his review of Heavenly Creatures Diastème (he writes reviews for the French edition of Première) wrote that Pauline's adolescence before Juliet's arrival was shallow and undisturbed. Not so. Yes the girl was alone, shy, and not very talkative either - although she did tell Juliet that her drawing was 'fantistic' -, but she was boiling from the inside, and it's that same deep energy we sense in Melanie Lynskey's portrayal of Pauline.

Only yisterday, I was compilled to execute several pisants...

One cannot talk about Melanie Lynskey without mentioning her accent :) Raised in New Plymouth, New Zealand (see Vital Facts), she has the thickest (and cutest) kiwi accent (by the way, if you wish to express your views on this or anything else regarding Mel, there's always the forum). One can only be charmed by her 'yisterday's, 'hir's, 'bid's and so on. There is evidence that Pauline Parker didn't have as thick an accent as she was trying to lose it for a more fashionable British accent, but Melanie's speech is what sticks to your ear and makes you repeat whole threads of HC-dialogue just for the sheer pleasure of feeling those vowels coming out of your own mouth (arent phonetics great or what ?).
[update on this: in the letter she sent me (I'll never thank her enough. Thank you again) Melanie writes:
"My own voice in real life is kind of different from Pauline's in Heavenly Creatures. I did lots of voice work on that movie & spoke quite deeply & intensely. I also has a stronger New Zealand accent. It's stronger than my own actually was at the time."
Which makes me even more admirative... Can't believe she didn't get an award for this role. Or actually I can, because recognition can be so arbitrary...]

Then we've got all those little things like nose-wrinkling (I once had the project of doing a section on Nose-Wrinkling in HC, but I had to abandon the idea - it proved to be too vast a subject) and heavenly smiling which make her so charming and irresistible ... when Juliet is around.

For Melanie managed to change her acting according to Juliet/Kate Winslet's presence onscreen with her. She can be both attractive and horribly scary, depending on whether she's staring at the mother that she loathes or her fellow heavenly creature Juliet Hulme.

You can also read more of my stuff on Heavenly Creatures:
These were not supposed to be part of this page as they are not that Melanie-related, but at popular request they were included in my site...

So, what's an HC-Fan like ? - an inside view on an obsession. Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all ? Or whatever... :)

Translation Class - naah, just a few versions of the titleHeavenly Creatures around the world... And if you know of any title that I haven't mentioned please email me!!!

Première July 1996 - I didn't write this. This is the article that introduced me to HC. With the picture that irrepressably drew me into the film.

All this being said, this film is larger than anything we might reduce it to. I am reminded of this everytime I watch it.

© 1997 tommywebmaster@yahoo.com