RIDE WITH THE DEVIL

JANE CAMPION RETURNS WITH HER FIRST MOVIE IN 12 YEARS, THE POWER OF THE DOG, A HEART-WRENCHING – AND POTENTIALLY OSCAR-WINNING – 1920S TALE OF SIBLING RIVALRY. JOINING HER AND THE CAST, TOTAL FILM SADDLES UP TO TALK RANCHING, RAGE AND REPRESSION.

- JAMES MOTTRAM

It’s been a dozen years since Jane Campion last directed a feature film, the sensuous John Keats biopic Bright Star. Since then, she created and oversaw two seasons of the brilliant Kiwi murder-mystery Top Of The Lake, but even she began to “reminisce” about making another film. “Two hours… I think it’s such a beautiful length to communicate something,” she says. “There’s such a sort of discipline and rigor to it. So I yearned for the idea of doing something carefully and beautifully again.”

It’s day one of the Venice Film Festival, and the silver-haired Campion is sitting with Total Film on the sun-drenched Excelsior Hotel terrace. By the eleventh day, she will be back on the Lido to claim the Silver Lion for Best Director for The Power Of The Dog, an exquisite odyssey to rival even her Cannes-winning masterpiece The Piano. Adapted from Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, it’s a 1920s Montana-set tale of two cattle-rancher brothers and the woman who comes between them.

The sensitive George Burbank is the brains: intelligent, business-minded, and good with numbers. His brother Phil is a skilled rancher. He’s also crude, homophobic, insulting, forever calling his sibling “fatso”. Then George meets and marries Rose, who runs a rooming house with her effeminate teenage boy Peter, both left bereft after her husband took his own life. “A suicide widow,” snarls Phil, the first of many barbs he fires as he schemes against her.