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| Their mother, Julia (Kate Winslet), moved to Marrakech in search of spiritual
enlightenment. It's 1972, the summer of love has long ended. The giddy optimism
of the '60s has soured. Those who seek themselves must find it elsewhere.
While Julia rejects the "selfish" nature of material things, her children
teach her how much they matter. Julia wants to travel to Algeria and speak with
ancient mystics. Meanwhile, her lonely girls keep griping about going home.
They're hungry and tired. The desert is an enormous place with too much sky.
You could get lost in its stars, like salt spilled on a black tablecloth.
They say travel is a teacher. Julia might believe this. But her children are
whispering little words of wisdom, if she'd pause to listen. They'd chant a
mantra that equals the opposite of Julia's hippie anthems--that structure
isn't necessarily bad. Money means more than we admit. Lasting relationships
feel healthier than fleeting ones.
Hideous Kinky commendably sketches its unconventional family with an objective eye
(and none of the romanticism one might predict). People are neither good nor
bad. They're simply human. Many times Julia puts her needs before her
children. Then, in the listless manner of many young mothers, she remembers
how grown-ups behave. Her lover, Bilal, (the roguish Said Taghmaoui from
Mathieu Kassovitz's Hate) turns flips in the market square for quick cash.
When he attempts to meet the girls' needs for father and family head, he
fails, but not without valiance. He's not your usual thief, ridden with
racial stereotypes. He's a confused child, like Lucy, like Bea, like Julia.
Along the way, they meet a wealthy expatriate family (including French
thespian Pierre Clementi) who have fashioned a continental oasis in the
desert. Julia, in her quest for "pure joy, blissful emptiness, no pain,"
decides to ditch her eldest daughter and take to the road. Free of
responsibility, her elation is echoed by the drug-addled hitchhiker she
encounters, posed Christ-like in the back of a speeding pickup truck.
Hideous Kinky is based on the 1992 novel by Sigmund Freud's
great-granddaughter, Esther. While the book is autobiographically told
through the younger child, the film lacks a specific reference. Lucy might
serve as the ideal narrator, lacking condemnation for the mother. Instead,
the film floats between contrasting attitudes and confusing points of view.
The opening dream sequence is a race through a maze of khaki-colored
corridors, exemplifying a child's darkest fear of becoming lost in unfamiliar
territory. For no particular reason, the film switches perspectives and
credits this dream to the mother.
The film probably worries that audiences won't sympathize with the
self-indulgent, hash-smoking Julia, so they soften her character as
protagonist. Julia has no direction and, therefore, no all-encompassing need
to drive the story. Her children, however, are teeming with the desire to
return home; they are the more obvious choice as heroines. This is one of many
problems in adapting a book to screen. Chronology is another dilemma.
Hideous Kinky (named for the nonsense words the girls giggle, making
English a foreign language) brings to mind A Soldier's Daughter Never
Cries, James Ivory's adaptation by another writer of famous parentage,
Kaylie Jones, which balances the emotional boundaries of two different
cultures. In Hideous Kinky, the steady routine of London contrasts with the
wayward rhythms of North Africa in a kind of Dionysian/Apollonian harmony.
Director Gillies MacKinnon crams his setting with sensory overload. The
desert becomes a fifth character. Dust rises like eraser bloom on a
chalkboard. Dunes drift like leaves. The soundtrack wails, "Don't you want
somebody to love?" and the answer, of course, is yes. The film is flawed but
beautiful. So are its characters, in search of the "annihilation of the ego."
That's why the happy ending feels so tragic, like a Christmas present filled
with clothes that no longer fit.
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