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United States / Australia 1999
Directed by
Jane Campion
114 minutes
Rated M

Reviewed by
Bernard Hemingway
2 stars

Holy Smoke

Any film that has a demented Harvey Keitel in a red dress and one cowboy boot chasing Kate Winslet through the Australian desert with books tied to her feet with cellophane must win some points. On the other hand a demented (and starkers) Winslet urinating on her feet is less prepossessing.

It's anyone's guess what is going on with this film. Campion has a reasonable track record with well-produced (her regular producer, Jan Chapman, is back for this) middle ground arthouse films but with this she sticks her neck into unfamiliar territory and gets it well-and-truly chopped off.

Telling the story of the relationship between a young Australian (Winslet) who gets involved in an Indian religion and is brought home by her family to be re-programmed by an American "exiter",(Keitel) the film lurches between broad Aussie comedy that is never funny (although Sophie Lee as the bubble-headed sister-in-law has her moments) and serious drama that can never be taken seriously. And thrown into the mix are a few wonderfully kitsch visual moments (accompanied by blaxploitation queen, Pam Grier) enhanced by Dion Beebe's hyper-realist cinematography and Angelo Badalamenti's music.

Is it an absurdist farce? a satirical comedy? a feminist fanatasy? a psychological drama? Or, as they say, all of the above. What Campion (she wrote the script with her sister, Anna) is trying to say with this mish-mash is indecipherable. At its most promising the film appears to be incubating some kind of identity transfer concept such as Losey's The Servant or Donald Cammell's Performance but in the absence of any credible writing, this brief glimmer of hope is soon abandoned for standard romantic comedy developments, albeit somewhat skewed.

Perhaps a Spike Jonze/Charlie Kauffman combination could have pulled this off but the Campion sisters have a too linear sensibility to make their ideas fly and Holy Smoke is, at best, of curiosity interest.

 

 

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