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We assumed correctly that Holy Smoke might profoundly
affect some viewers, and we thank those who loved the film for sending us their
comments. We are now able to appreciate the film more.
One of our readers suggested that dominating male energy is
like a desert in which nothing can grow, a world without water so vividly filmed
in Holy Smoke’s Australian Outback setting.
There is no doubt that Jane Campion is trying to illustrate
the firm grip of male control on the world and women. In the cult, Ruth idolizes
a male figure as a source of unconditional love. At home, Ruth’s mother is a
comical shell of a woman serving her dysfunctional husband and sons. The force
that is to free Ruth from her cultic bonds is again male. Perhaps, the
dominating male energy dries up the world, but Campion then swings the pendulum
all the way to the other side by showing us the devastating power of a woman
fully unleashing her sexual power in a deluge of wetness, like a murderous flash
flood. This swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme is itself out of
balance and out of control.
In the extremes of male or female energy, neither PJ nor Ruth
are able to find joy, love, and fulfillment. Although PJ’s maleness is
dominating and controlling, he is still a mere shadow of a man he could truly
be. Although Ruth’s feminine power grows to uproot PJ’s controlling grip,
she is still dependent on receiving and gobbling up love rather than loving.
Only when the pendulum swings back to the middle can PJ give up domination and
Ruth embrace compassion. What we see at the end of Holy Smoke, with Ruth
helping save animals in India and PJ with his newborns in Los Angeles, is an
ambiguous possibility, but one of hope that arises out of the stripping down
each had done during their mad time together.
Miriam Cohen writes:
"For
me, the great difficulty was not so much the believability of plot (which is
something that many reviewers have cited), but rather the pacing. Some scenes
were far too long whereas others suddenly ended just
when you really started to get into it. Also, many critics are
commenting on how pathetic it is that Harvey Keitel spends a good part of
the film in a dress. I thought that was the highlight of his
performance. He seemed bored with the material and that absolutely came across.
Kate Winslet, on the other hand, is the
greatest actress whose work I have ever seen. Her portrayal is brilliant.
The slightest movements, gestures, and facial expressions are integral to the
character and the scenes. Although I did not enjoy the film overall, I think this is one of Kate Winslet's best performances."
Roz Chatt writes:
"Holy
Smoke shows a lot that you don't ever see in a typical American film, such
as the mystical experience of Divine Love and the equally mystical power of
sexual love, and how each form of love totally annihilates conventional
bourgeois reality and is thus seen as madness. Did the story come out and
"explain" this? No, and the filmmakers probably assumed that people
would not understand this intellectually, but I got the feeling from the
audience at the end of the show that people did relate and understand
emotionally.
The
breakthrough in the story really came after PJ had surrendered himself
and became vulnerable and trusted Ruth's perceptive wisdom and did that
whole thing with the dress. By being forced to see his body objectively,
as a woman his age he found neither attractive nor sexy, PJ allowed
himself to be shown how ridiculous he was to think he was still the
young stud. It was through his humiliation that he truly became involved
with the person Ruth was and not simply the body she possessed. It was
this that taught Ruth that human kindness is what really matters, but PJ
didn't really learn the lesson. He had become merely infatuated and
intoxicated by his desire. Through her inner strength, Ruth learned the
lesson despite all the madness, and she demonstrated it at the end when
she held PJ in the back of the pickup. At the very end, in their shared
letters and expressions of true friendship, the film further confirms
that Ruth and PJ had in fact opened themselves to each other in a real
way and that what had happened, though bizarre, was transformational,
evolutionary, and genuine.
I
agree with all that you said about the issues of male dominance and
female sexual power, but I found that the issues went far beyond all of
that "battle of the sexes." Ruth was a smart young woman, in
touch with her sexual nature, as well as her inner spirit. Although she
had some real confusion about the importance of her sexuality, no doubt
due to the ignorance of men in her culture, she eventually puts that in
perspective. So, far from seeing the film as pretentious, incoherent, or
illogical, I found it to be very coherent."
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