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AN English woman and two girls roam the whirling-dervish momentum of
Marrakech's main square, a torchlit bazaar teeming with snake charmers,
hooded men and veiled women. At 25, Julia (Kate Winslet) has transplanted
herself to Morocco to get away from a dead-end life in a one-bedroom
flat -- "London's cold," she says, "cold and sad." The culture shock
is acute: allusions to East Acton and such home comforts as mashed potatoes,
rice pudding and a merry Christmas resonate oddly in this inscrutable
land of keyhole doorways and roadside camels.
Taking up with the resident hippy crowd circa 1972, Julia is scraping
together a hand-to-mouth existence by making and hawking rag dolls.
"No-one wants dolls, Mummy," states her precocious eight-year-old daughter
Bea (Bella Riza). The fall-out of a parent open to off-the-beaten-track
experience, Bea and six-year-old Lucy (Carrie Mullan) are savvy beyond
their years from acting as ballast for their mother's flyaway idealism
-- it takes them to point out that the women in the harem-like courtyard
where they live are prostitutes. Lucy is gamely along for the ride,
but the bewitching and cynical Bea, who feels she ought to go to school
and have a more conventional life, proclaims, "I don't need another
adventure." Yet living abroad is inherently an adventure, and when Julia
throws in her luck with handsome acrobat Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui, from
"La Haine") -- an equally lost soul who has renounced his village origins
and lives off his gymnastic and quarry-mining skills -- the three Englishwomen
set off into a world of hitchhiking, wealthy expatriates and exotic
asceticism.
"Hideous Kinky" is comprised of several cobbled-together journeys, but
the armchair travelogue -- evoking the sensory overload of Morocco --
doesn't always sit well with the gradual inner voyage of a woman who,
in going afar to seek the 'annihilation of the ego', visits her egocentrism
on her more grounded offspring. While their viewpoint forms the backbone
of Esther Freud's spry and accessible novel, which is narrated by younger
daughter Lucy, the movie focuses on their mother. As the too-credulous
Julia, striving for enlightenment and radiant in flowing traveller garb,
Kate Winslet racks up another compelling performance.
That MacKinnon ("Small Faces", "Regeneration") tends to cut away at
crucial moments lends his unobtrusively directed film a sense of incompletion
and uncertainty mimetic of Julia's aimlessness. But despite its moving,
frequently entrancing episodes, "Hideous Kinky" feels as arid as the
landscape and as wayward as its central questing character. Toeing a
simplistic line about escapism versus common-sense responsibility, the
film can't cross the threshold beyond Morocco's closed doors. Instead
"Hideous Kinky" conveys a piecemeal portrait of a woman who, in trying
to get away from her country and herself, gathers up some homespun truths
but remains a stranger in a strange land.
Expat
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