Holy Smoke (2000)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Just perfect...

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

You have to be open minded to really enjoy it. As if your trying a new recipe on your pizza.

"Holy Smoke !" is an amazing film by one of the most original directors as Jane Campion("An Angel at my table","The piano","Portrait of a Lady").It tells the story of a young Australian woman,Ruth Barron(Kate Winslet),who in her journey in India is manipulated by a guru and is turned into a proselyte. The family tries to get her back by hiring an eccentric and apparently self-assured American cult exit,P.J. Waters(Harvey Keitel)and isolate the two of them in a lonely hut in the middle of the Australian desert. The fight between Ruth and P.J. take an unexpected turn:the battle field changes from religion to sex;Ruth becomes the master and P.J. surrenders to her overwhelming sexuality. The film manages to reflect on the power of ideas, sex fight and the at first glance self-confidence of west culture and beliefs(Ruth's family lacking of values and coherence,P.J. attitudes)and the subsequent quest for paramount meanings(Ruth's absolutism)in a world that can be dangerous. The direction is wonderful and Jane Campion give us a very absorbing film even though sometimes difficult to catch. After a plodding beginning you can't help but feeling captured by this strange but absorbing film. The acting is superb. Harvey Kaitel is a confirmation and delivers particularly well. Kate Winslet is a revelation. She completely disappears in her difficult and sometimes hateful character and becomes body ans soul Ruth. It's a testament for her great versatile acting. My vote is 10/10.

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.

I wanted to like Holy Smoke more than I did. There is a clear study in the film, a likable element about it that establishes one thing, develops that and then has the audacity to spin things around onto its head for our own amusement. The film isn't bad as much as it is a little misguided and inconsistent in tone; thus, a tad frustrating by the end. It would have been nice for the film not to have spilt out into a realm of comedy and not get so over-rawed by itself when it relies purely on the image of Harvey Keitel in a dress to get across feeling instead of developing what new level it's attempting to lever up onto.The film is principally a study of the power certain people or 'texts' can have over others, or those of a weaker, more naive, disposition. The one thing the film does tell us is that it can be anybody who falls for the charms or tricks of anybody else, even macho PJ Waters (Keitel) who is supposed to be this ego-driven; ever immune; hard-as-nails; 'never takes no for an answer' and 'nobody puts one over him' caricature. The film's other victim of texts or ideation's that have 'influenced' them to act in artificial ways is a certain Ruth Barron (Winslet), a simplistic and relatively likable Australian girl with a steady life and a family that is very fond of her.PJ exists in the film because of Ruth's inability to deal with the influence a certain Indian guru's image and ideas have on her. Ruth exists in the film to bring PJ into her life and furthermore influence him in both a spiritual and sexual sense. For the best part, the film looks at what affect certain texts and teachings can have on the young and outgoing plus whatever affect those attempting an anti-thesis on these beliefs can further suffer at the hands of their own patient. Unfortunately, the film cannot hold it all together and incorporates elements including, but not limited to: slapstick comedy; loose, sexy women as a drive for potential humour; well-known, female global stars in the nude for sake of hearsay as well as well known, male global stars dressed as women for a similar sake.The film begins with Ruth in India. Whilst there, she falls under the influence of a popular Indian guru at the tapping of a forehead and a staring into the eyes. Job done, it would seem. Following this, she becomes trapped in the mindsets and ways of life so much so, that her mother has to fly out in order to 'rescue' her. Ruth doesn't come home initially, but after some banter and some comedy revolving around what a supposed dump really India is, she returns to Oz. Once home, there is a particularly eerie scene in which members of her own family have gathered as one to subdue her, thus refraining her from escaping back to the 'evil' world of India with all their 'evil' influential practises that they do on young, Western women. Could have been worse; they could've conned her into giving away her credit card details as well.Hark, when there's something strange – and it don't look good, who are you going to call? Why, PJ Waters of course – a man listed somewhere in the phone-book under 'exorcist', I imagine. PJ is charged with ridding Ruth of these Hindu beliefs. I didn't think it would be so easy, otherwise we wouldn't have had a film, would we? I was expecting it to bed down and become a struggle of sexual politics as this gum chewing, snake skin boot wearing, shades wearing person, who's given all the build up he needs, went up against this young woman out to discover herself in the big, wide world. I was expecting a study of identities, a look at the role of one's self in contemporary Australia and how the Indian 'beliefs' perhaps elevated her to a new spiritual sense thus helping her see things the way she wanted.What we get is a bizarre passage of events. The 'exorcism' plays out and mutates into a sort of 'patient begins to become object of doctor's desire' relationship between the two that further aids in bringing out PJ Waters' feminine side, so to speak. I found it quite amusing at how female director Jane Campion turns the tables on us; how she presents the female of the piece as weak minded and foolish, while the male is the battle-weary, intellectual individual out to 'correct' the female before mixing it all up and turning it on its head. Alas, on the whole, Campion is more interested in shooting Winslet in an array of skimpy outfits (before Kietel gets a chance of his own); she is more interested in a young boy dressed as Batman jumping off a car roof and smacking into the ground as a guardian fails to catch him; she is more interested in the flirtatious attitudes of Yvone (Lee) to act as humour and when lines like "I'm sorry Ruth, I should never have slept with you." from PJ evoke guffaws more than anything else, you sort of realise things are not all well.There were some things I liked about Holy Smoke, but they aren't focused on enough for me to recommend it. Once Ruth becomes PJ's object of desire following a bizarre scene in a night club, the film falls apart somewhat and just becomes a slightly unconventional love story with very un-cinematic, and un-likable in equal measure, words like 'quirky' and 'kooky' being able to be attributed to it. The premise has been solved, we're heading off in new directions and the whole thing just fizzles out in a misery-strewn manner. Not a disaster, but not focused and even enough to be fond of.