HOLY SMOKE

CINEMA (Greek)

December 1999

This Smoke harms seriously your health, if you are wild feminists, impenitent male chawvinists, worships of the like-the-air Gwyneth Paltrow, religious or like the ones who think that Catherine-Zeta Jones and Micheal Duglas are an ideal couple.

At first, the mind fights with only one thought: what a great actress is the brave Kate Winslet. All the rest come later.... In the closed in the shell of past India, Ruth discovers her ''home'' in the teachings of a guru. Paniced her family hires an ''exorcist'' in order to ''save'' her. Like different ''Eva and Adam'', all-alone in the middle of the desert, the 20-year-old Ruth and the 50-year-old P.J.(Keitel) duel with their ''spiritual'' swords defending eachone his/her beliefs and his/her....''sexual inclination''. Soon sex becomes an indispensable weapon at the ''battle'' and the frontiers between love, religious faith (that both of them demand total surrender and trust) and the persistance disappear.

Campion returns to the idiosyncratic humour of Sweetie, the red Australian ground and the psychoanalytic directorial of the simplicity in order to make a movie that loves women as much as men. Wanting to laugh provocatively with the cliches, which scourge the film couples (and they are not absent neither from the so-called woman movies), Jane avoids to choose a side between the conflict of her heroes. She watches with sharp irony the macho persona of P.J. and with ''clean'' eyes the ''distroying'' egoism of Ruth. He bets to the weight of his experience (he believes that he has seen everything), she bets to the fearless nature of her age (she has all of her life in front of her and nothing to be afraid of).

Their meeting afflicts the gradual decomposition of their powerful ''ego'', the roles are inverted, while the teacher becomes the pupil and the pupil becomes the teacher, the male becomes the feminine and the feminine becomes the male. Fatally, both of them lose their compass in a relationship that starts from the unconcern, walks through the stubborness, the admiration, the hate, the hypocrisy, the passion, the madness, the conciousness and the despair to reach the compassion, the humbleness and the politeness.

The uncontrolled curves of the unwrought body of the eartly Kate (if you close your eyes and stretch your hand, you may touch her) remind us that the real beauty isn't available only in extra small. The sentimental ''strip'' of the haughty Harvey ''acquits'' the male sensitivity. The culture, the dressing and the atmosphere of the film reflect the confusion that the great deal of opinions, ideas, prophesies and fears at the end of the century imposes.

At the end, the collation of the upset internal routes of Ruth and P.J. with ''cosmic order'', which surrounds them, discovers our vulnerable humaneness, which was never a privilage (or a misfortune) of the one only sex.