Harper's Bazaar

True Believers

December 1999

In Holy Smoke! Kate Winslet's ecstasy matches Harvey Keitel's agony. Holy Smoke! is the newest gender Rorschach blot from the brilliant New Zealand director Jane Campion, and it's a pip. A film about a beautiful cult member and the sleazy deprogrammer who falls for her, it's also and exiquistely shot, infuriating, at times moving mess of a movie: It's not always altogether pleasant to sit through, but it's impossible to forget. Kate Winlset plays Ruth Barron, a young Austrailian tourist who, while traveling through India, succumbs to a religious cult. Ruth thinks she's found bliss, but her parents know she's lost her mind, and hire an American deprogrammer to get her back. Not a bad launch for any movie, but since Campion who conjured up "Sweetie", "The Piano", and "The Portrait of a Lady"--radically destinct versions of female desire--it's only the beginning of a mystery tour through landscapes material, pyschosexual, and just plain weird.

Harvey Keitel plays deprogrammer, P.J. Waters, an oil slick in head-to-boot black, who squirrels Ruth away to an abandoned house soon after he lands. Ego-to-ego, the two engage in one of those he said, she said head trips that show the director at her best (and occasional worst) as insults are hurled and lust betrayed. Campion has always been a maximalist, but she also knows how to temper her visual flamboyance and agitated passions with disciplined itelligence. It's been impossible to pinpoint a superfluous image in her work, much less a foolish idea--until now.

The problem starts with the film's laboriously casual veneer, then works its way through to the core. Watching Campion twirl her camera around here is a lot like watching a classically trained dancer try to boogie, only to see her trip over her feet. The worst stumble, though, comes not in the film's stylebut in its substance. Deep into the deprogramming, the controller becomes the controlled and Keitel ends up lurching about in a dress. Holy Smoke! is a no-holds-barred riff on the nature of transcendence: religions, sexual, metaphysical. But aipping Keitel into a frock isn't radical or new, its simply embarrassingly trite. As hard as it is to believe, it would have been better for everyone if he'd just kept his clothes off.