HOLY SMOKE! (Miramax) Starring: Kate Winslet, Harvey Keitel, Julie Hamilton, Sophie Lee. Screenplay: Anna Campion and Jane Campion. Producer: Jan Chapman. Director: Jane Campion. MPAA Rating: R (nudity, sexual situations, drug use, profanity, violence) Running Time: 114 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Late in HOLY SMOKE!, Jane Campion's latest attempt at gender provocateurship, the principal male character refers to the principal female character as a "man-hater." The principal female character then responds that he calls her a man-hater "just because I criticize you." I would never be so crude as to suggest that Campion is a man-hater, but it's hard to not to wonder what testosterone-soaked demons haunt her. It's one thing to ask pointed questions about gender-based power dynamics; it's quite another to ask those questions using such weighty symbolism that it's hard not to laugh out loud at the raving significance-mongering of it all.
Campion's painfully strident stylings get a workout in HOLY SMOKE!, a film that gets sillier and less insightful the longer I think about it. Kate Winslet stars as Ruth, a young woman from Sydney who begins following a charismatic guru while travelling in India with a friend. Concerned that Ruth has been taken in by a "cult," Ruth's family hires one of the world's most successful "exit counselors," P. J. Walters (Harvey Keitel) to bring her around again. After luring Ruth back to Australia under false pretenses, the family leaves her in an isolated cabin with Walters for three days, where he expects to break her down and build her up again. But things don't work out quite so simply, leaving both parties searching for their roles in their strange relationship.
For a little while, it almost seems that Campion is on to something. The opening montage, in which Campion sets up Ruth's introduction to "Baba's" teachings, is an energetic sequence set to Neil Diamond's "Holly Holy." Better still are the scenes of Ruth's mother (Julie Hamilton) visiting Ruth in India, her anxieties betraying the fact that she may be most concerned about her daughter falling in with dark-skinned people. By mixing in the racist element with the sexist elements of her story, Campion promises a film that could have been a fairly complex examination of exerting power and manifesting fear of "otherness."
Don't expect anything quite so measured. From that provocative beginning, HOLY SMOKE! quickly disintegrates into a sluggish, rib-kicking polemic. Walters is introduced, with little room for misinterpretation, as a preening and self-important sort who slicks back his dyed hair, receives oral gratification from Ruth's ditzy sister-in-law (Sophie Lee) and prepares for his meetings with Ruth with breath spray. Ruth, meanwhile, is a free spirit whose earth mother dance to "You Oughtta Know" provides all the ur-femme credentials you could want. Campion seems little concerned with exploring the side of Ruth that quickly transfers her devotion from Baba to Walters. She's far more fascinated with the sociological implications of a woman trying to escape into the wilderness by strapping books to her feet, or of Ruth and Walters playing a role-reversal game in which Walters is dressed up in lipstick and a skimpy red dress. For those of you who think one of cinema's most unnecessary images was Keitel's free willy in Campion's THE PIANO, please consider Keitel in lipstick and a skimpy red dress.
I suppose some viewers could find themselves intrigued enough by the shifting nature of Ruth and Walters' relationship to give its freakish elements a pass. I found it far too hard to take HOLY SMOKE! seriously as anything other than an opportunity for Campion to rattle our collective cage, whether the image is a nude Ruth urinating in front of Walters or Walters hallucinating Ruth as a many-armed Indian goddess. It's not so much shallow as it is garish and over-wrought, an Important Message Movie without a solid base of characterization to ground it. It has begun to appear that Campion is more concerned with filming themes than with filming stories, struggling against oppression without making that oppression recognizable in human terms. There's no need to use terms like "man-hating" for that kind of film-making. "Clumsy" just about says it all.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 smoke symbols: 4.
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