In a Shakespeare play like 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', the seeming order of the ruling caste hides a hotbed of anxieties, sexual, social, identity etc. To work these problems out, the action is moved away from the ruling centre to a nearby green space, a forest for example, where these anxieties and repressions are allowed to play themselves out before order is healthily restored.
Jane Campion in HOLY SMOKE uses this model, but there is no normality, health or restoration here. Ruth and PJ play out their psychodrama in the outback away from the bourgeois normality that is desperate to reassert itself. Because Judy's great crime is not the joining of a loony cult, but the fact that she has run away, she has made her own choice, she has refused the hypocritical grind of conventional domesticity and marriage, in favour of a more liberating connection.
It is not really the point that this is quaintly old-fashioned material, or that Judy's cult IS loony, that its appropriation of Hindu authority is gleeful kitsch, that the 'guru''s intentions may be less than spiritual, that Campion films the Indian sequence, as with much else in this deceptively 'serious' film, with surreal flippancy. The fact is that Judy's transgression is contrasted with the 'normality' of her home life, a life based on mendacity, adultery, sickness, idiocy, and, worst of all, a repressive conformity verging on the fascist (or cult-like), made even more frightening in that the grotesques surrounding her seem so loveably stupid.
Campion's method in the film seems to be to wear everyone down, to strip everyone of illusion, faith, pride, pretension. This is how the struggle between Judy and PJ plays. In one way it's a LAST TANGO IN PARIS-exercise in sexual nihilism. Out in the wilderness, in the 'cave' as PJ calls it, stripped of inessentials, both characters engage in a gladiatorial conflict, removing all conventions and defences, until they are bloody and beaten, they are not longer the selves they have created for themselves.
No one wins, we are brought to the beginning, we are allowed start again. Judy goes back to India, where she began the movie, PJ abandons his lecherous ways to become a partner, father (and after the families we've seen, this is hardly a victory) and novelist. The 'normal' family are in a sense rent too: the father finally leaves with his mistress, the mother goes to renew herself in India with Judy, the sister has already cheated on her doltish husband.
Can it really be this simple? The mind/sex games seem to take place according to very violent S&M principles, and the sexual undercurrent bursts into role-play, gender fluidity and humiliation. But is there a real counter to the violence inflicted on Judy? The horrifying scene where she is corralled by her male 'family' is continued by PJ's games, and the attempted rape in the nightclub. PJ as a bullying agent of male domination deserves to be cut down to size, but what did Judy do to deserve her punishment? The whiff of female masochism running throughout is possibly suspect - we expect it of Harvey at this stage, but can women only experience freedom through degradation, or is this just a 'comment' on how liberated women really are today?
The difficulties (and ultimate pleasure) of the film lies, you see, in its wavering tone. Although the film copies Wong Kar-Wai's fluid subjective style on occasion in its use of colour and editing, there is an oppressive theatricality as you would expect with a conflict between two protagonists in a fixed set. And while the film concerns some very fundamental traumas, there is a vein of absurd humour that Campion seemed to have lost in her previous prestige costume dramas, but that is gloriously in evidence here, slapstick, unexpected, silly, crude, surreal, wonderful.
This fluidity of forms, of tones, mirrors the identity and gender issues the film raises. Campion's sense of landscape, authentic and in awe, yet laced with both heightened camp and Hollywood melodrama, is unique, further charged in that this mythic Australian space is being contested by Anglo-Americans, as well as Woman and Man. In spite of some flaws - pacing in the second half especially - this is much better than the reviews have been claiming.
Jane Campion in HOLY SMOKE uses this model, but there is no normality, health or restoration here. Ruth and PJ play out their psychodrama in the outback away from the bourgeois normality that is desperate to reassert itself. Because Judy's great crime is not the joining of a loony cult, but the fact that she has run away, she has made her own choice, she has refused the hypocritical grind of conventional domesticity and marriage, in favour of a more liberating connection.
It is not really the point that this is quaintly old-fashioned material, or that Judy's cult IS loony, that its appropriation of Hindu authority is gleeful kitsch, that the 'guru''s intentions may be less than spiritual, that Campion films the Indian sequence, as with much else in this deceptively 'serious' film, with surreal flippancy. The fact is that Judy's transgression is contrasted with the 'normality' of her home life, a life based on mendacity, adultery, sickness, idiocy, and, worst of all, a repressive conformity verging on the fascist (or cult-like), made even more frightening in that the grotesques surrounding her seem so loveably stupid.
Campion's method in the film seems to be to wear everyone down, to strip everyone of illusion, faith, pride, pretension. This is how the struggle between Judy and PJ plays. In one way it's a LAST TANGO IN PARIS-exercise in sexual nihilism. Out in the wilderness, in the 'cave' as PJ calls it, stripped of inessentials, both characters engage in a gladiatorial conflict, removing all conventions and defences, until they are bloody and beaten, they are not longer the selves they have created for themselves.
No one wins, we are brought to the beginning, we are allowed start again. Judy goes back to India, where she began the movie, PJ abandons his lecherous ways to become a partner, father (and after the families we've seen, this is hardly a victory) and novelist. The 'normal' family are in a sense rent too: the father finally leaves with his mistress, the mother goes to renew herself in India with Judy, the sister has already cheated on her doltish husband.
Can it really be this simple? The mind/sex games seem to take place according to very violent S&M principles, and the sexual undercurrent bursts into role-play, gender fluidity and humiliation. But is there a real counter to the violence inflicted on Judy? The horrifying scene where she is corralled by her male 'family' is continued by PJ's games, and the attempted rape in the nightclub. PJ as a bullying agent of male domination deserves to be cut down to size, but what did Judy do to deserve her punishment? The whiff of female masochism running throughout is possibly suspect - we expect it of Harvey at this stage, but can women only experience freedom through degradation, or is this just a 'comment' on how liberated women really are today?
The difficulties (and ultimate pleasure) of the film lies, you see, in its wavering tone. Although the film copies Wong Kar-Wai's fluid subjective style on occasion in its use of colour and editing, there is an oppressive theatricality as you would expect with a conflict between two protagonists in a fixed set. And while the film concerns some very fundamental traumas, there is a vein of absurd humour that Campion seemed to have lost in her previous prestige costume dramas, but that is gloriously in evidence here, slapstick, unexpected, silly, crude, surreal, wonderful.
This fluidity of forms, of tones, mirrors the identity and gender issues the film raises. Campion's sense of landscape, authentic and in awe, yet laced with both heightened camp and Hollywood melodrama, is unique, further charged in that this mythic Australian space is being contested by Anglo-Americans, as well as Woman and Man. In spite of some flaws - pacing in the second half especially - this is much better than the reviews have been claiming.