This is a review of the film from a column I wrote in a lifestyle magazine in 2000.
As a staple of our dating and weekend ritual, dinner and a movie is a well-entrenched institution. As a lover of both fine food and good cinema, I would like to offer la cocinita's well-fed readers a monthly pick from the recent releases on video. Keep in mind: my set of tastes isn't always entirely rational. While I have a penchant for upsetting, aggressive movies such as Hate and Natural Born Killers, I can also enjoy the subtlety of films like Dead Man or Wings of Desire. More often than not, I am drawn to thought provoking films no matter how much they try my patience or wrench my stomach. But then to spite myself, I'll fall in love with Starship Troopers. Go figure.
This month, I turn your attention to the latest drama from Jane Campion, Holy Smoke, starring Kate Winslet (Titanic, Heavenly Creatures) and Harvey Keitel (The Bad Lieutenant, Mean Streets). (Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, Foxy Brown) gets third billing, but don't hold your breath or blink if her name drew you to the movie.) The movie opens in India where the young, beautiful and impressionable Ruth (Kate Winslet) and her Aussie friend are on vacation. Amongst the bustle of an overcrowded, smoke-filled plaza, Ruth notices other white girls dressed in saris, giggling and appearing to fit into these foreign and mystical surroundings.
At this point I lost valuable screen time attempting to divine the meaning of the Neil Diamond tune playing over the images of ex-patriot hippies writhing on a rooftop in India, but soon I was pulled back to the rest of the plot's setup: Ruth finds herself literally touched by a guru and believes that he has shown her the way to enlightenment. Her family, of course, believes she has been drugged or swindled into the starry notions the guru has fed her. They hire PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel) to rid her of the influence of the alleged cult leader. As PJ trains his will on Ruth to break her of her "false" mysticism, we are brought into intimate contact with Ruth's unresolved issues from a childhood crying for communication and nurturing.
What follows is a well-acted tete-a-tete between the troubled Ruth and PJ's macho American caricature as they explore each other and themselves. This is the meaty section of the film where PJ systematically strips Ruth of her belongings, both physical and mental, that have anything to do with her India experience. In this process, the tables become turned as he is forced to look at himself in the mirror. At the finish line, Ruth's romantic notions are all but dead and PJ winds up in the middle of the desert wearing a dress and red lipstick. Who won the war of the wills? You be the judge.
Holy Smoke is written by Jane Campion and her sister Anna and explores issues of a large dysfunctional suburban family and coercive, overbearing father figures. In other words, this is classic Campion. These have been common themes in Jane's previous work in one strain or another, and now her sister is getting in the same bed, if you will. Jane started exploring these issues in the mid 80's in her short films "Peel," "A Girl's Own Story," and "Passionless Moments," and continued the thread with her features Sweetie and The Piano. In Holy Smoke, the Campion sisters dive head-first into the burning cauldron of sexual politics between a young woman searching for meaning and an adult well-entrenched in his beliefs. As in other Campion films, this films attempts to pull into focus the psycho-sexual nature of male-female relationships, especially young women's relationships with father figures. On one level the film seems to say that male domination is arousing, and on the other hand its message seems to be that a little T & A can go a long to making a man submissive. While Campion's themes have a tendency to bewilder, I found Holy Smoke to succeed where some of her other films may have not, largely due to Kate Winslet's character and the strong performances by the rest of the cast, as well as the enchanting, warm cinematography (Dion Beebe) throughout the film.
A collection of Campion's shorts are available on the compilation titled (thought-provokingly enough) Jane Campion Shorts. If you find yourself attracted to Jane's present work, I recommend viewing her shorts, especially since it is uncommon to find most filmmaker's early work on tape. By the way, both "Peel" and The Piano won a Palm d'Or at Cannes, which just so happens to be the biggest gold star a filmmaker can ever receive.
With Holy Smoke, Jane Campion has made another interesting piece of cinema. But beware, this is no light fodder. The film covers some fairly heavy territory that could well make you take a second look at yourself and the sordid relationship with your family that you would rather stick in a dark place. Nonetheless, if you would rather lay back and take in the beautiful backdrops of India and Australia, this is a fine film as well.
As a staple of our dating and weekend ritual, dinner and a movie is a well-entrenched institution. As a lover of both fine food and good cinema, I would like to offer la cocinita's well-fed readers a monthly pick from the recent releases on video. Keep in mind: my set of tastes isn't always entirely rational. While I have a penchant for upsetting, aggressive movies such as Hate and Natural Born Killers, I can also enjoy the subtlety of films like Dead Man or Wings of Desire. More often than not, I am drawn to thought provoking films no matter how much they try my patience or wrench my stomach. But then to spite myself, I'll fall in love with Starship Troopers. Go figure.
This month, I turn your attention to the latest drama from Jane Campion, Holy Smoke, starring Kate Winslet (Titanic, Heavenly Creatures) and Harvey Keitel (The Bad Lieutenant, Mean Streets). (Pam Grier (Jackie Brown, Foxy Brown) gets third billing, but don't hold your breath or blink if her name drew you to the movie.) The movie opens in India where the young, beautiful and impressionable Ruth (Kate Winslet) and her Aussie friend are on vacation. Amongst the bustle of an overcrowded, smoke-filled plaza, Ruth notices other white girls dressed in saris, giggling and appearing to fit into these foreign and mystical surroundings.
At this point I lost valuable screen time attempting to divine the meaning of the Neil Diamond tune playing over the images of ex-patriot hippies writhing on a rooftop in India, but soon I was pulled back to the rest of the plot's setup: Ruth finds herself literally touched by a guru and believes that he has shown her the way to enlightenment. Her family, of course, believes she has been drugged or swindled into the starry notions the guru has fed her. They hire PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel) to rid her of the influence of the alleged cult leader. As PJ trains his will on Ruth to break her of her "false" mysticism, we are brought into intimate contact with Ruth's unresolved issues from a childhood crying for communication and nurturing.
What follows is a well-acted tete-a-tete between the troubled Ruth and PJ's macho American caricature as they explore each other and themselves. This is the meaty section of the film where PJ systematically strips Ruth of her belongings, both physical and mental, that have anything to do with her India experience. In this process, the tables become turned as he is forced to look at himself in the mirror. At the finish line, Ruth's romantic notions are all but dead and PJ winds up in the middle of the desert wearing a dress and red lipstick. Who won the war of the wills? You be the judge.
Holy Smoke is written by Jane Campion and her sister Anna and explores issues of a large dysfunctional suburban family and coercive, overbearing father figures. In other words, this is classic Campion. These have been common themes in Jane's previous work in one strain or another, and now her sister is getting in the same bed, if you will. Jane started exploring these issues in the mid 80's in her short films "Peel," "A Girl's Own Story," and "Passionless Moments," and continued the thread with her features Sweetie and The Piano. In Holy Smoke, the Campion sisters dive head-first into the burning cauldron of sexual politics between a young woman searching for meaning and an adult well-entrenched in his beliefs. As in other Campion films, this films attempts to pull into focus the psycho-sexual nature of male-female relationships, especially young women's relationships with father figures. On one level the film seems to say that male domination is arousing, and on the other hand its message seems to be that a little T & A can go a long to making a man submissive. While Campion's themes have a tendency to bewilder, I found Holy Smoke to succeed where some of her other films may have not, largely due to Kate Winslet's character and the strong performances by the rest of the cast, as well as the enchanting, warm cinematography (Dion Beebe) throughout the film.
A collection of Campion's shorts are available on the compilation titled (thought-provokingly enough) Jane Campion Shorts. If you find yourself attracted to Jane's present work, I recommend viewing her shorts, especially since it is uncommon to find most filmmaker's early work on tape. By the way, both "Peel" and The Piano won a Palm d'Or at Cannes, which just so happens to be the biggest gold star a filmmaker can ever receive.
With Holy Smoke, Jane Campion has made another interesting piece of cinema. But beware, this is no light fodder. The film covers some fairly heavy territory that could well make you take a second look at yourself and the sordid relationship with your family that you would rather stick in a dark place. Nonetheless, if you would rather lay back and take in the beautiful backdrops of India and Australia, this is a fine film as well.