Jane Campion's biography of her New Zealander countrywoman -- author Janet Frame -- was made originally for TV, and for showing in three separate parts at that. Had it been a feature-film project from the start, no doubt its proportions would have been totally different. The chosen narrative technique of short impressionistic vignettes does not generate much momentum, and two-and-three-quarters hours of not-much-momentum makes for a long sit. Individual vignettes, in conception if not always execution, are stabbingly pungent: the elementary-school prize of a free pass to the Athenaeum (looking appropriately Acropolitan) and the harvest of library books carted home to feed the entire family ("Zane Grey!" enthuses Dad); the heroine's discarding of her sanitary napkins in the crevices of the local graveyard in preference to burning them with the rest of the household trash; her clock-stopping fixation on the piece of chalk in her hand when a school inspector petrifyingly sits in on her classroom to observe her apprentice teaching. The list could grow long. That last-mentioned scene, however, comes closest to the obsessional and fetishistic world of Campion's SWEETIE. And the theme illuminated there, and elsewhere, of a sense of personal strangeness -- of a sense of unfitness, or at least of an uncomfortable fitness, in human society -- is a clear carry-over also. With Kerry Fox, Alexia Keough, and Karen Fergusson. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd