As negative as we are about the movie as a whole, we were enthralled with the absolutely mesmerizing erotic and physical power of Kate Winslet. We have never seen sequences that were so worshipful of the raw sexual allure in a young woman, a power that she really does not understand or have control over and that nearly destroys both her and everyone around her. The flow of her body with all of its natural hair displayed in gloriously complete wonder from axilla to ankle formed sheer visual poetry. We still thrill a bit in remembering the sight of the sun glimmering off Kate’s leg hairs. When she stripped off her Sari in the desert, stammering naked, incoherent, and vulnerable from the loss of the props of her cultic dependence, she is so distraught as to piss herself. It is hard to remember a more expressive moment of someone hitting bottom and letting go.

There are nagging issues that, in all our rushed embrace of greater freedom and liberation, still remain to trouble us. Perhaps they always will as part of our biological and social constitution. Serious film story creators like Jane Campion have the potential to provide us with cinematic answers, parables if you will, that entertain us while showing us how we might live.

What do we do with young women who have reached their full Aphroditic allure with neither the sense of how to use it nor the sense of its destructive power? We have become uncomfortable binding young women into early marriages or shuffling them into convents. We rightly espouse a doctrine of equal worth and the freedom to achieve personal fulfillment.

Similarly, in our time of religious tolerance in which we champion the right to make unconventional choices and to move beyond the faith of our parents, how do we stop people from choosing religious and spiritual paths that lead to their cultic enslavement while at the same time respecting their freedom of choice that may in fact be exercised as a reasonable antidote to suburban, middle class spiritual starvation? In large measure, part of a freedom is the right for us to make fools of ourselves without interference.

Jane Campion’s cinematic stories weave powerful themes of unleashing the natural erotic power of women emerging from cultural and male repression. Her most famous film exploring this theme is the Academy Award Winning Piano. In Holy Smoke, Jane and her sister Anna wrote the screenplay. It is impossible to attribute the source of the problem, but suffice it to point out, cultic deprogramming and religious freedom seem more of a pretext to bring together young Australian guru groupie Ruth (Kate Winslet) and American super-deprogrammer PJ Waters (Harvey Keitel).

The thematic, dramatic, and spiritual power of Holy Smoke is fractured even further when the story meanders into almost silly side bars featuring Ruth’s disjointed middle class Australian family of misfits and malcontents. Rather than having a comic respite to catch our breaths, we experienced moments of mental grimace best articulated by an interior "huh". 

The basic set up begins in Australia and India. Ruth’s best friend returns from a holiday trip to announce that she has left Ruth behind from their vacation in India. Ruth has joined a Guru based cult. The family rallies and Mum (Julie Hamilton) goes to fetch the wayward child. A fabrication about the father’s impending death fails to break Ruth loose, but an asthma attack where Mum almost dies and must be medevacked back to suburban Sydney succeeds. Wrapped in a Sari and adorned with Indian make up marks, Ruth is taken to an outback ranch and surrounded by her family’s male members while Mum wrings her hands in tears in the kitchen. Comparing Ruth's ecstasy in India to the dysfunctional mess of her family, we wondered if she was not best off in her cult.

In lizard boots, died hair, and with a porn star mustache, ace American deprogrammer, PJ, strides onto the scene. He needs three days to be alone with Ruth and an assistant. He never works alone, and he almost bolts back to America because the assistant is not available. He breaks this rule he lives and works by and takes Ruth to an isolated cement house in the middle of the desert where he will gain her attention, break her down, and then allow her to regroup without her cult dependence. At least, that is his plan.

Ruth realizes that both her cultic dependence and her family life have left her empty. In a scene of exceptional power, she shrieks that her greatest fear is that no one will love her for her heart. How many of us have felt the deep gaping hole of doubt that we would ever be truly known and loved? No one in her family seems capable of moving beyond their posturing and roles. Her guru loved everyone. And so, almost instinctively, perhaps projecting out her rage, her fear, her loneliness, she turns on PJ. Not only does PJ have the kind of heart that invites others to open themselves, but he also has sexual charisma, perhaps more than he knows, certainly more than he can control. Clearly, he knows that women are drawn to him. He receives oral sex from one young women in a somewhat improbable circumstance, more contrived than flowing with the plot. But, he has never been alone with a young one coming out of the emotional whirlpool of vulnerability his crash deprogramming engenders because that would violate his discipline.

Thus the movie takes its turn into the heart of sexual power play. On this field, PJ is canon fodder to Ruth’s flood of emotion and allure. She does indeed deprogram, but what she comes down to in her soul is cruel, heartless, rapacious. She ends up slicing the old man to ribbons. Literally screwing his brains out.

And then things become weird, really weird. Ruth confronts PJ with his inability to love, desire, and be with a woman his own age. She puts her red dress on him, applies makeup to him, and forces him to look at himself in the mirror to see the woman his own age that he should be with. This hardly seems a fair charge since he did not want to be alone with her in deprogramming. Further, it is hard to imagine any heterosexual or even bisexual man who would resist her. Dressing PJ as a woman seems like a lecture about older men who are unfair in their inclinations toward younger women. It is a dramatic point worth making, but in a different movie since it doesn't flow from the characters. 

This thematic line completely breaks down into nonsense when PJ’s Los Angeles assistant and lover Carol (Pam Grier), a woman of exquisite beauty and allure of PJ’s age, comes onto the scene. Carol shows no signs of suffering from lack of sexual power. Here would have been a perfect opportunity to show the older woman reclaiming her relationship prerogatives with her man and teaching the younger woman something of the realities of mature feminine sexual power. This could have been the bridge that allowed Ruth to escape the spiritual and erotic wasteland of her middle class heritage, to escape the grip of celibate mass "marriage" to a guru in a cult, to escape the ravages of her unchained allure. Carol exudes wise integration neither in rebellion or cultic slavery, but centered within her own considerable sexual power.

Even though the themes are a mess, there is pure cinematographic magic in the scenes of the desert, and in the luminous glow from Kate Winslet’s gorgeous eyes. Anyone who believes that a fuller figured woman cannot inflame the modern screen is clearly mistaken. Furthermore, there is a sort of weird comic aspect to the final scenes, though they were to us mostly disappointing in the context of what the story promised.

We hope that some of you will write us to provide perspective and insight that we may have overlooked. This is after all a complex movie with many layers. It has some aspects of a Rorschach test and your subjective interpretation and overlay may take it differently than we did.