Copyright New Republic Feb 7, 2000JANE CAMPION'S CAREER takes on a shape. Before her latest film, she made four features. The two that were based on books were appealing. Angel at My Table treated Janet Frame's autobiography with compassion and vigor; The Portrait of a Lady gave Henry James some lively, if presumptuous, advice about the novel he ought to have written. But the two Campion films made from original scripts were disappointments. Sweetie was a distended effort to engage our empathy for an unbalanced young woman, and didn't. The Piano was a heavy load of pretentious symbolism. Now her fifth feature arrives, made from an original screenplay. The division continues.
Holy Smoke! (Miramax) was written by Campion and her older sister Anna, a former actress. Its subject is the attraction for Westerners of Asian religion, or at least Asian spirituality; its theme is the latent hunger for the unmaterial in a dominantly materialistic society. This is hArdly a new film idea: City of Joy and Beyond Rangoon are only two recent examples. Still, the sisters Campion attempt a particular view of the struggle between the two cultures: they present it as a gladiatorial combat in the arena of sex.
The Campions, born in New Zealand and professionals in Australia, use an Australian young woman as protagonist. Ruth Barron, from a cookie-cutter Sydney suburb, travels to India with a girlfriend and comes under the spell of a guru in an ashram. The mark that he literally puts on her brow illuminates, she thinks, the path to goodness within. Ruth decides to remain in the ashram. The friend returns to Sydney and reports to her family.
Ruth's family is a demographic assembly: an "average" middle-class mother and father, a gay son, a married son with a hot-pants wife. They are all shocked by Ruth's decision, and Mum goes to India to bring Ruth home. As lure, she tells Ruth that Dad has had a stroke and is dying. While Mum is in India, she herself has a bad asthma attack. Ruth brings her home, only to learn that Dad's stroke was a lie-a typical falsity, she thinks, of this degraded world. She will go back to the ashram.
But the family has devised plans to keep Ruth at home. They have retained an American "cult exiter," P. J. Waters, who has succeeded one hundred and eight-- nine times in persuading cultists to leave cults. Ruth of course resists the idea of Waters, but since he says he needs only three days, since the family surrounds her and pleads, she agrees to go off with Waters to a cottage in the outback for three days, quite confident that he will not affect her.
Those three days, which turn into four, are the core of the film. And are also its trouble. Partly this is because Ruth is played by Kate Winslet. She is so intense and heated, so breastily nubile, that her isolation for three days with this counselor-as all of us can foresee-is not going to be entirely clinical. (At one point she even says to him: "Do you like my personality or do you like my breasts best?") Further, Waters is played by Harvey Keitel, who, though middle-aged, is obviously meant to be Mr. Testosterone. These two characters, no matter what the therapeutic chat, are plainly bound for bed; so as we listen to the talk we just wait for the inevitable action. (A contradictory cavil here. Keitel, who was in The Piano for Campion, doesn't have the ball-bearing power that the role needs. We soon imagine an actor of higher voltage in the part-- say, Nicholson or De Niro. This would have made the long duet even more predictable but much more involving.)
The duet goes up and down the scale of likes, dislikes, flirtings, fights, longings, repulsions. After a day or so, Ruth invites sex, then is repelled the morning after. (Earlier, when Waters met her febrile sister-in-law to pick up supplies, he was also supplied with a personal sexual service-- this to emphasize his potential with Ruth.) A lot of the Ruth-Waters dialogue, en route to the sack, is mock-psychoanalytic game playing. She: "What do you believe in?" He: "Why do you want to know?" To fill the films need for variety, the screenplay takes the pair one night to an outback disco with her brothers and the sister-inlaw. There Ruth does a suggestive lesbian dance and ends up being groped by two men in the parking lot-just to emphasize her incessant sexuality. Waters extricates her manfully and takes her home.
All this by-play wriggles toward the inevitable finish. In a faint reminder of Bergman's Persona, the patient becomes the healer, the healer becomes the patient. When Waters becomes absolutely desperate for Ruth, she tries to escape across the desert with books strapped to her feet. (Waters has hidden her shoes.) He pursues her, wearing the lipstick and red dress that she has put on him-in ridicule of his sexuality-and that he has accepted because by now he is her slave. As they stumble across the wide desert, he pleads with her to marry him, but she keeps going. He has to knock her out to stop her. At last, after several more twists, she pities the reduced and now-impotent man. At further last-"One Year Later," in fact-an exchange of postcards between India and America reveals that she has won but that he is restored.
Two details must be added. At one point in the desert duet, Ruth spells out HELP with white stones on the ground outside the cottage, for any passing plane and, rather blatantly, for any passing divinity. Second, Waters's female assistant, who has been delayed in America, arrives at the outback cottage on the third day, becomes jealous and agrees to wait only one more day for him to finish his job with Ruth. Quite apart from the structural clumsiness of her late appearance, that assistant is the worst piece of casting in the film-- the stunning black actress Pam Grier, who brings sheer movie-ness into what is meant as Strindbergian rigor.
The setting naturally figures in the film: the desert vastness, a distant train sliding silently away, the full moon (twice), the scarlet sunset and sunrise. Campion even enlists dark clouds as background when Waters bums Ruth's sari. The fierce colors and the awesome space are meant to give a cosmic texture to the film, a sense of the blunt elements waiting below the plottiness. Nature does in fact help a bit; but there remains the film's neat predictability, from the patness of Ruths previous environment (those stuffed animals in her Sydney bedroom, the family singing Malotte's musical version of the Lords Prayer) to the dramaturgical lump of the duet in the desert.
The screenplay sometimes slashes with sharp dialogue, and Campion's directing unmistakably breathes conviction. What she lacks is sufficient humor to see when she approaches the risible and sufficient perception to keep her seriousness fresh. Her film-making, her stertorous doing of it, misleads her. Apparently she needs a previous work-a book, however she may alter it-as armature.
To which I quickly add that Campion has helped Kate Winslet to a complete performance. Winslet realizes every fiber, every fantasy, every enzyme, in Ruth's being. She is not only a gifted actress, she is daring. Yes, there was Titanic; but in Sense and Sensibility, in Jude, in Hideous Kinky (a role comparable to Ruth), even in her not quite successful Ophelia for Kenneth Branagh, she has shown an appetite for growth and the talent to support it.
Readers may remember that in September I commented at length on Godfrey Cheshire's two-part article (in the New York Press), "The Death of Film/The Decay of Cinema," an important discussion of new distribution methods and of digital film-making. In January, the Museum of Modem Art in New York held a symposium to discuss Cheshire's article, featuring Cheshire and five others from various film fields. The discussion was enlightening, and I was gratified to see that at least some of the speakers were worried about the effect that the new dispensation, however technologically fine, may have on the content of films.
Another concern occurred to me later. Until now, a number of people have been agitating for film preservation. The films that we already have we actually don't have-to a shocking degree. They disintegrate and otherwise disappear in incredible numbers. As the new millennium brings us the new technology, will this concern about these past films diminish? Will TV-cable distribution and the digital process not only alter the future but the past?
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