Holy Smoke
USA 1999
Reviewed by Stella Bruzzi
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Delhi, India. Young Australian Ruth Barron joins a cult, leaving her friend Prue to return to Sydney alone. Prue tells Ruth's horrified family of her friend's conversion. To lure her back, Ruth's mother Miriam travels to Delhi and pretends Ruth's father Gilbert is dying. They fly home.
P.J. Waters, an American "cult exiter", is hired by Ruth's family. He begins his three-day deprogramming of Ruth in a shack in the outback. On the evening of day two, Ruth starts to break. P.J. shows the family a video about cults and brainwashing. Later, Ruth and P.J. have sex. On day three, Ruth joins her gay brother and mates at the local pub, where P.J. saves her from being gang raped. Carol - P.J.'s partner - arrives unexpectedly. Ruth and P.J., who is now besotted with Ruth, argue about religion among other things. She dresses him up in women's clothes. The family arrive. P.J. locks Ruth in the boot of his car so she won't reveal what's happened between them, but her sister-in-law Yvonne lets her out. Ruth runs off, chased by a hallucinating P.J., who offers to return to the cult with her. In the bed of the family truck, Ruth and P.J. embrace. One year later. Ruth is living in India, and P.J. and Carol have twins. P.J. and Ruth continue to correspond.
Review
Holy Smoke is an exquisite and unexpected film. Frank Auerbach once remarked that fellow British painter Michael Andrews was a great artist because he only ever produced masterpieces; a similar tribute could almost be paid to Jane Campion, despite the odd blip, such as The Portrait of a Lady, a film weighed down by the expectations generated by The Piano. Paradoxically, despite the echoes in Holy Smoke of earlier work such as Sweetie and Passionless Moments, the latest film is mature and finely polished. Both in style and subject, Campion has abandoned the earnest precision of the crinoline genre and has resuscitated the light, witty touch she displayed in her films set largely in modern times. For all its stylistic richness, The Piano lacked spontaneity; Holy Smoke - the story of recent cult convert Ruth Barron's confrontation and eventual relationship with "cult exiter" P.J. Waters - is vibrant, alive, and comes more from the heart than the head.
Symptomatic of this shift towards imaginative exuberance is Campion's abandonment of Stuart Dryburgh's lush but convoluted camerawork (his swooping, vertiginous helicopter shot over the New Zealand cliffs in The Piano is now an oft-imitated cliché). Shot by Antipodean DP Dion Beebe (Crush), Holy Smoke's style is more playful. Its mise en scène juxtaposes mundane detail with pyrotechnic flights of fancy (for instance, the garish, hypnotic Pierre et Gillesesque sequence marking Ruth's conversion, or P.J.'s hazy, love-fuelled vision of Ruth as a six-armed goddess). In both The Piano and The Portrait of a Lady such extravagances jarred (remember the 'talking' lima beans in Portrait?); here they're tropes integral to the narrative and keys to understanding Ruth and P.J.
Holy Smoke is ostensibly a film about cults and cultism, in much the same way as Sweetie and Angel at My Table were about mental illness. But as with those films, what makes Holy Smoke so joyous (as if Campion herself is finding the means to express her liberation from the costume film's stays) is the fact that the subject matter never constricts the film. It's only one element in a much richer narrative centring on the ambiguities of characters and relationships, Campion's most consistent preoccupation.
On paper, the love affair between cult member Ruth and her deprogrammer P.J. sounds like a cliché. But in Campion's hands their liaison becomes emblematic of how power trickles back and forth between lovers. By degrees, P.J. and Ruth's roles are reversed as she becomes his guru. Holy Smoke doesn't judge their mutual dependence: Ruth's susceptibility is an imaginative need, a craving for a life freed from banality, hence the preponderance of subjective fantasy sequences. At first P.J. is characterised by a lack of fantasy, but by the end he has discovered a comparable desire for imaginative liberation as he permits her to dress him in a provocative red dress, to daub his lips with matching lipstick and to transform his life. Existence is a chain; we learn from and mimic each other.
In this way, cultism may be the catalyst for the action in Holy Smoke, but it is essentially a film about the tenuousness of most people's sense of self - our decentredness, our malleability, our vulnerability in the face of our own desires and the manipulative skills of others. Everyone in the film, not just Ruth, is impressionable (there's her mother who returns to India with her at the end; there's her sister-in-law who, when she isn't imagining sex with film stars, falls for P.J. in much the same irrational way as Ruth did), and they all, in the chaos that pervades the whole film, are attracted to each other in a desperate attempt to flee from themselves.
Certainty and identity are learned, not innate. In delivering this idea, Holy Smoke is Campion's most superficial film, brimming with visual trickery, sudden changes of direction, unpredictable characters. It is ultimately about reconciling imagination with reality. Just as the film marries fantasy and realism, so the characters, having undergone their own tortured and extreme awakenings, become reconciled to compromise. Across continents Ruth and P.J. become virtual lovers, a state of being, the film suggests, we're all in. Holy Smoke can be read as a text of reconciliation: between realism and surrealism, earnestness and irreverence, oneself and the world. It is an immense, emotional, engrossing film that nevertheless wears its brilliance casually.
Credits
- Director
- Jane Campion
- Screenplay
- Anna Campion
- Jane Campion
- Director of Photography
- Dion Beebe
- Editor
- Veronika Jenet
- Production Designer
- Janet Patterson
- Music
- Angelo Badalamenti
- ©Miramax Film Corp
- Production Company
- Miramax Films presents
- a Jan Chapman production
- Executive Producers
- Bob Weinstein
- Harvey Weinstein
- Julie Goldstein
- Producer
- Jan Chapman
- Line Producer
- Cathy Bishop
- Associate Producer
- Mark Turnbull
- Production Associate
- Indian Crew:
- Antonia Barnard
- Production Co-ordinators
- Clare Shervington
- Indian Crew:
- Rudabah Nanporia
- 2nd Unit Co-ordinator
- Daniel Read
- Unit Managers
- Simon Lucas
- Wil Milne
- Indian Crew:
- Pravesh Sahni
- Location Manager
- Maude Heath
- Locations Manager
- Indian Crew:
- Sanjay Kumar
- Location Co-ordinator
- Indian Crew:
- Rajeev Mehra
- Base Liaison
- Sally Chesher
- Pushkar Liaison
- Indian Crew:
- Dilip Kumar
- Post-production Supervisor
- Catherine Bishop
- 2nd Unit Director
- Jackie Farkas
- Assistant Directors
- Mark Turnbull
- Jane Griffin
- Marty Hallman
- Julian Ryan
- 2nd Unit:
- Simon Warnock
- Indian Crew:
- Shajahan
- Hasan Kutty
- Kudleep Khangarot
- Continuity
- Lynn-Maree Danzey
- Casting
- Alison Barrett Casting
- US:
- Billy Hopkins
- Suzanne Smith
- Kerry Barden
- Indian Crew:
- Uma Da Cunha
- US Associates:
- Mark Bennett
- Jennifer McNamara
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Jackie Farkas
- Camera Operator
- Dion Beebe
- Visual Effects
- Animal Logic
- Visual Effects Supervisor:
- Andy Brown
- Executive Producer:
- Zareh Nalbandian
- Producer:
- Fiona Crawford
- Lead Compositor:
- Kirsty Millar
Compositors:- Charlie Armstrong
- Robin Cave
- Leonie Willis
- 3D Animator:
- Aiden Sarsfield
- Technical Support:
- Naomi Hatchman
- Aaron Barclay
- Special Effects
- Studio Kite
- Steve Rosewell
- Warren Beaton
- Marcus Erazmus
- Art Directors
- Tony Campbell
- On-set:
- Chris Elliott
- Indian Crew:
- Nitin Desai
- Set Decorators
- Rebecca Cohen
- Lisa Thompson
- Draftspeople
- Godric Cole
- Beth Pickworth
- Indian Crew Draftsman
- David Soures
- Scenic Artist
- Matt Connors
- Costume Designers
- Janet Patterson
- Associate:
- Angus Strathie
- Costume Supervisor
- Paula Ryan
- Hair/Make-up Supervisor
- Noriko Watanabe
- Make-up/Hair Artists
- Noreen Wilkie
- Kylie Marr
- Additional Make-up/Hair
- Margaret Aston
- Title Design/Production
- Animal Logic
- Designer:
- Andy Brown
- Executive Producer:
- Zareh Nalbandian
- Producer:
- Fiona Crawford
- Compositor:
- Kirsty Millar
- R&D:
- Chris Bone
- 3D Animator:
- Brett Feeney
- End Titles
- Optical & Graphic
- Opticals
- SOS Digital
- Richard Springett
- Score Conductors/
- Orchestrators
- Angelo Badalamenti
- Phil Marshall
- Music Editor
- Julie Pearce
- Chief Engineer
- Gary Chester
- Music Consultant/
- Researcher
- Christine Woodruff
- Music Consultant to Jane Campion
- Andrew Kotatko
- Soundtrack
- "Holly Holy", "I Am ...I Said" performed by Neil Diamond; "Trust in Me" performed by Rani; "You Oughta Know" by Alanis Morissette, Glen Ballard, performed by Alanis Morissette; "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again" performed by The Angels; "I Put a Spell on You" performed by The Angels; "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" performed by Jimmy Boyd; "The Lord's Prayer" by A.H. Malotte; "Baby It's You" by Burt Bacharach, Mack David, Barney Williams, performed by The Shirelles; "Pucho Jara Puchho", "Jo Tumhe Chahe Us Ko" by Nadeem, Sameer, performed by Kumar Sanu, Alka Yagnik &chorus; "Gem Song" by Kishore performed by DJ Gem; "Indian Asram Music" by Shiva Vyas, performed by Shiva Vyas & company; "Primitive" by/performed by Annie Lennox; "Maya, Mayi Ma - The Celebration" by Angelo Badalamenti, Chloe Goodchild, arranged by Angelo Badalamenti, performed by Chloe Goodchild
- Choreography
- Tobin Saunders
- Sound Design
- Lee Smith
- Sound Recording
- Ben Osmo
- Sound Mixer
- Roger Savage
- Production Dialogue Editor
- Tim Jordan
- Effects Editor
- Peter Townend
- ADR
- Supervisor:
- Karin Whittington
- Editor:
- Nicholas Grusovin
- Foley
- Artists:
- Simon Hewittson
- John Simpson
- Religious Consultant
- John Cleary
- Adviser/Muse to the Director
- Penny Allen
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Lawrence Woodward
- Animal Wrangler
- Evanne Chesson
- Cast
- Kate Winslet
- Ruth Barron
- Harvey Keitel
- Peter John 'P.J.' Waters
- Pam Grier
- Carol
- Julie Hamilton
- Miriam, mum
- Tim Robertson
- Gilbert, dad
- Sophie Lee
- Yvonne, Robert's wife
- Daniel Wylie
- Robbie
- Paul Goddard
- Tim
- George Mangos
- Yani
- Kerry Walker
- Puss
- Leslie Dayman
- Bill-Bill
- Samantha Murray
- Prue
- Austen Tayshus
- Stan
- Simon Anderson
- Fabio
- Eve Martin
- Mira Wright
- Polly Wright
- Lior Aizenberg
- S. Samaran
- Michelle Abel
- Adina Kumar
- Jeff Silverman
- Andreas Wagner
- Vandana Mohindra
- devotees
- Savrash
- Saurabh Srinivasan
- dancing boys
- Dhritiman Chaterji
- Chidaatma Baba
- Genevieve Lemon
- Rahi
- Robert Joseph
- Miriam's taxi driver
- Valerie Thomas
- Miriam's double
- Arif
- boy who runs with taxi
- John Samaha
- Chatiwall, Shiva's diner
- Jane Edwards
- Priya
- Miranda Cleary
- Priya's daughter
- Tamsin Carroll
- Jodie
- T'mara Buckmaster
- Zoe
- Ante Novakovic
- man with trolley
- Diana Kotatko
- Patricia Lemon
- women with trolley
- Ethan Coker
- Toddy Barron
- Ellie Burchell
- Tiffany Barron
- Morgan Watt
- Luke Testo
- William Mackay
- David Franco
- boyfriends
- Eleanor Knox
- Meryl
- Angels
- Doc Neeson
- Rick Brewster
- John Brewster
- Jim Hilburn
- Brent Eccles
- band
- Mark Gray
- dope peddler
- Cameron McAuliffe
- Tim Rogers
- seducers
- Johannes 'Maddy' Brinkmann
- Ruth's boyfriend
- Eric Schussler
- Joan Bodgen
- Robert Lee
- cult video reporters
- Certificate
- 18
- Distributor
- Film Four Distributors
- 10,311 feet
- 114 minutes 35 seconds
- Dolby digital
- In Colour