Staying power
DESIGN Wasted lives: our throwaway culture on show
The Power of the Dog is the first feature film Jane Campion has directed in 12 years. That it happened at all is down to her picking up Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name and not being able to put it down. “I was actually thinking of retiring before I did this film,” she says, matter of factly, “but then I thought, ‘Oh man, this is gonna be a big one.’ I’d read the book and loved it and afterwards I just kept thinking about it. When I made a move to find out who had the rights, that’s when I knew it had got me. I needed to do it.”
Campion’s disillusionment with the mainstream thrust of contemporary Hollywood film-making is not new, but of late it seemed to have reached a tipping point. In the 00s, she didn’t make a feature film at all, instead co-directing two acclaimed series of the television drama Top of the Lake, starring Elisabeth Moss, finding it energising. “I loved the fact that you can explore complex and controversial work and the audience in their homes are totally up for it,” she says, “whereas with film it’s hard to do work like that, because as soon as some exec says they don’t understand it, you’ve lost the game. But, to be honest, I was so exhausted after Top of the Lake that I thought, ‘Oh my God, making a two-hour film seems like heaven.’”
The Power of the Dog certainly packs a lot into its two hours: filial tension, machismo, toxic masculinity, gaslighting, repressed homosexual desire and revenge, all played out
