HIDEOUS KINKY
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Stratosphere Entertainment Director: Gillies Mackinnon Writer: Gillies Mackinnon, novel by Esther Freud Cast: Kate Winslet, Said Taghmaoui, Bella Riza, Carrie Mullan, Pierre Clementi, Sira Stampe, Abigail Cruttenden, Ahmed Boulane, Michelle Fairley, Kevin McKidd
Listen to Julia (Kate Winslet), the gorgeous 25-year-old character in Gillies MacKinnon's movie "Hideous Kinky," and you'll wonder how London ever got to be one of the world's most populated cities. Cold, damp, and dreary, the British capital--in her mind--would hardly justify that ad slogan, "If you're tired of London, you're tired of living." But then, not everyone lives in a frosty, one-room flat in the south end of the town like Julia and you've got to suspend a great deal of belief to accept the particular that one so attractive, so adventurous, so absolutely engaging should have to put up with living in a warren. We don't get to see any part of London in this picture: not Big Ben, not Kiwi Court, not Julia's pad, but photographer John de Borman needn't worry: his canvas is filled with the sights and sounds of Morocco from its exotic principal city of Marrakesh to the barren desert sands to the south. The film takes place in 1972, in the midst of the hippie era which saw hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Americans and western Europeans toking on weed, tripping on acid and generally dropping out even as the Vietnam War was drawing to a close. Though hashish and the stronger drugs were illegal in the picturesque North African country just as they were in the States and in England, somehow nobody hassled the flowers of western civilization that camped out from the northern tip of Tangier just across the Straits of Gibraltar to the lightly populated southern end of Tarfaya.
"Hideous Kinky" does a wonderful bit of product placement for the Moroccan Tourist Bureau in a country that many other producers have found amenable for capturing biblical ambiance, but this is the one of the few British-made films actually meant to take place in that locale. Esther Freud, whose late 1960's novel with the same name is based on memories of her own journey which she took in the company of her mother and sister, relates her tale strictly from a child's point of view. The book possesses ruminations which do not translate to the screen, particularly since "Hideous Kinky" lacks the sort of narrative that we either loved or hated about "The Thin Red Line." The unfortunate result is that while the movie works just fine as a travelogue, one which may well encourage Americans to travel to a country no farther in distance than Paris, as a story it miscarries. Books, like plays, are often by nature uncinematic, and translate best when they are freighted with action, not philosophy.
The story centers on Julia who is fed up with her near-slum existence in London as well as with her poet-husband's philandering, and believes she can learn to discover inner knowledge by meeting a famous Sufi in Algeria. But first to Morocco to give her girls, the eight-year-old Bea (Bella Riza) and the six-year-old Lucy (Carrie Mullan) a global perspective. Despite her limited funds, she has gone to Marrakesh on three one-way tickets hoping that her husband's checks would see them through. When the money does not arrive, she becomes increasingly desperate, even to the point of selling dolls on the street and thereby acquiring the hostility of the native women. She has, however, found a fulfilling relationship with a scamp, Bilal (Said Taghmaoui), who genuinely cares for her but who is a shady character making a living partly from unnamed criminal activity, doing heavy work, performing acrobatics for tourist dollars in Marrakesh's main square, and telling fortunes to cynical young women on holiday. While little Lucy bonds to the young Moroccan man whom she accepts as a father- substitute, the more detached and, yes, somewhat obnoxious sister Bea wants out.
Winslet's acting is a wonder to behold, but despite her half- hearted attempts at going native, she makes suspending belief a difficult task. She does not fit in as a hippie, eschewing both drugs and drink. For a woman who hasn't a dirham to her name she looks awfully well appointed with a healthy face and a robust figure--which she shows off just a tantalizing bit while fooling around with Bilal in the unflustered presence of her daughters. Nor is Bilal quite credible, a man not likely to have had much formal education who nonetheless speaks a fluent English and who is aware--while doing backbreaking labor that would put him in good stead with the prisoners in Angola, Louisiana--that "Morocco is not England." As Julia--naive and irresponsible enough to have given birth to her first daughter at the end of seventeen-- learns some homespun truths the hard way, we in the audience may not help feeling that "Hideous Kinky" is a disjointed voyage that leaves us intellectually more informed but emotionally as arid as the Sahara desert which forms its backdrop.
Not Rated. Running Time: 98 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews