Expecting the unexpected from Jane Campion has become, well, almost predictable. But that’s about the only thing you can be confident of going into one of her movies, and “Holy Smoke!” is no exception.
It’s a spiritual comedy-drama that strangely but credibly evolves into a psycho-sexual power struggle. It careens from wild caricature to complex and alarming soul-searching. It presents leading lady Kate Winslet naked in a way one never would have imagined seeing her. And it shows us what Harvey Keitel looks like in lipstick and a dress.
As with all of the New Zealand writer-director’s work — “Sweetie,” “An Angel at My Table,” “The Piano,” “A Portrait of a Lady” and several distinctive shorts — “Holy Smoke!” incorporates eccentrically dysfunctional family relationships and a brand of eroticized, non-doctrinaire feminism so unique as to defy conventional responses. The latter has triggered both adoration and great unease in certain viewers, and neither sex nor political persuasion is necessarily a constant factor in an individual’s reactions.
A quiet but intellectually precise woman with tendrils of long blond hair and an eclectically layered fashion sense, the 44-year-old Campion doesn’t come off as the kind of person who upsets applecarts. Yet she’s devoted to her own, very particular world view, and while that’s brought her criticism it has also made her, arguably, the most acclaimed female filmmaker of her generation.
“I think around 97 percent of films are directed by men,” she dryly notes. “And if film is the most important cultural representation of our time, that means only 3 percent of the view presented is by women.
“And few men understand the secret thing about women, about what they’re like and how strong they feel and how unable they are to speak that strength,” adds Campion, whose parade of squelched heroines is led by Holly Hunter’s Oscar-winning mute from “The Piano.” “All girls know that you don’t say that stuff, you just think it, because you won’t be accepted for it. We’ve all gone through it. Normally, we have a situation (in movies) where men are defining the view. But `Holy Smoke!’ is a situation where the view talks back.”
Indeed. In the film, which Campion co-wrote with her filmmaker-sister Anna (“Loaded”), “Titanic” survivor Winslet plays a headstrong Australian teenager, Ruth Barron, whose ecstatic conversion to a meditation sect during a visit to India drives her eccentric suburban family into a dither. Tricked into returning home, Ruth soon finds herself trapped in an isolated Outback shack with a macho, middle-aged American deprogrammer, Keitel’s PJ Waters.
But while he’s trying to talk her out of her new religion, the not-as-enlightened-as-she-thinks-she-is Ruth detects cracks in her captor’s emotional armor. Soon, the issue shifts from a spiritual to a sexual arena, as Ruth seductively and often mockingly tries to deprogram PJ from his masculine delusions.
With the ruthlessness of youth on her side, it seems apparent that Ruth will win this new fight. But at what price to herself, or to the soul that she so evidently wanted to improve in the first place?
“When PJ first starts talking to Ruth, it’s in a very high-minded way about what their beliefs are,” Campion explains. “But that’s, in my view, not really where people live. People live in a kind of power relationship with each other. It seemed to me that in their situation, the sort of struggle that they were going to have meant that they would have to bottom out on everything, struggle in every area of their character.
“So, by going through the kind of dark, erotic hopes of their characters — which I don’t put down at all, but I think is where humans often live — they got to see how lost they were. When he implores her to be kind, it strikes her that she’s really lost, in a way, what she expected to be promoting. That’s a profound lesson that a young girl like her might learn for herself. And for him, conversely, there’s a profound lesson in humility and opening up, having his fake persona stripped back.”
Though some may see the film as a battle of the sexes, Winslet says, “There was no struggle of men and women in the film. It’s just that Jane is just a very honest person and that helped me convey my feelings onto the screen.”
Theoretically, anyway. But when it came time to film some of “Holy Smoke!’s” more unnerving stretches, things inevitably got a little clammy.
Despite having to appear stark naked, Winslet says, the nude scenes weren’t as difficult to do as the emotional scenes.
Campion agrees, saying, “The scene where Ruth has a breakdown in the desert — where she’s naked and, as some have put it, goes to the bathroom — oddly enough wasn’t nearly as traumatic for Kate to do as some of the more emotionally strained scenes.
“It’s one thing to play strong and feel good about yourself when you’re being enabled by the script to take a tough position with a man. But when you have to reverse that and be humble, to really experience that you have to find a way of getting in touch with that pain and be honest to it, that’s hard.
“It’s hard, in life, to do, and I think it’s hard for a young actor to do. Harder, in a way, than sex scenes, which are never great fun, but we know they’re going to happen and know the place in the schedule when they’re going to be, and we treat them with as much sensitivity as we can. And humor too. It’s usually pretty funny, and they’re not really as naked as they appear.”
Keitel, of course, is famous — and to some minds, infamous — for being as fully naked as he appeared to be in “The Piano.” And there’s no arguing the fact that he spends the final third of “Holy Smoke!” dementedly running about in a red dress, an image that some will find even more shocking than anything he did in the earlier Campion film.
The gender role smashing in “Holy Smoke!” echoes the themes of earlier Campion movies (as well as her next one, the sex-charged murder mystery “In the Cut,” based on Susanna Moore’s acclaimed novel and starring Nicole Kidman, who headlined the director’s Henry James adaptation, “Portrait of a Lady”). But the spiritual inquiry that runs through the film is relatively new for Campion, whose films are more commonly driven by psychological and political concerns. She says, however, that it expresses an important aspect of her own life.
“I suppose I’ve been a seeker myself for a long time,” she reveals. “I never actually joined any group, but I’ve tasted a lot of different things and read all about it and have had my meditation experiences, things like that. Basically, I believe that we are on a journey in this life, and that journey is to the heart. Many of us feel that pull and try to work out how to honor it.
“I’m not against cults, nor do I understand them in the same way that the scandal press sees them,” Campion adds. “Every religion started as a cult; (they) grow out of a kind of consensual reality that individuals either accept or do not. Some cults do have some very scary consequences, but there are all of these fascinating paradoxes that I like about the area.”
But like most Campion stories, “Holy Smoke!” boils down to a male-female relationship and the manifold conflicts involved in it. And, quite logically to her, the spiritual and the sexual are not that different from one another, at least in how our emotions perceive them and the movie presents them.
“We put a lot of our emotional hopes and beliefs in the romantic sexual relationship,” says Campion, who is separated from her husband (the couple has a 5-year-old daughter). “It’s very loaded for us, and in many ways it’s similar to religious experience. It requires belief — you believe you’re in love — and there’s an ecstatic experience involved in it. And there’s even a cult-like quality to it, where only this person is my soulmate and there couldn’t be anybody else. In that way, it’s kind of a cult of two.
“So we’re trying to cross them both here. After all, love and the opening up of the heart are required in both cases.”
