Courtesy Photo
"HIDEOUS KINKY"
99 minutes | Rated: R
Opened: Friday, April 23, 1999
Directed by Gilles MacKinnon
Starring Kate Winslet, Said Taghmaoui, Bella Riza & Carrie Mullan
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COUCH CRITIQUE
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SMALL SCREEN SHRINKAGE: 20%
LETTERBOX: COULDN'T HURT
Vista-conscious photography, which is the movie's strongest trait, won't beget the same sense of place from Morocco on the small screen. But the personal performances won't lose anything in the translation. Might be amusing to watch back-to-back with a couple "AbFab" episodes since Winslet's character seems a lot like a young Edina without the laughs.
VIDEO RELEASE: 7/6/99
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Rudderless young European seeks spiritual enlightenment in 'Kinky'
Maybe it's a generational thing, but in the last couple weeks I've seen two movies about the 1960s and '70s that, despite superb performances and solid direction, just did nothing for me.
The first was last week's "Metroland," a stoic defense of settling for a suburban commuter lifestyle after a wild youth. The acting was above reproach and it even stars my favorite actress, Emily Watson, but I still couldn't bring myself to give it more than two stars. I found it dull. Yet, my Baby Boomer colleagues have been raving.
This week I'm seeing the same chasm with "Hideous Kinky," the story of a young, hippie mother (Kate Winslet) who drags her two reluctant daughters hither and yon around Morocco, circa 1972, living a day-by-day bohemian lifestyle and telling the kids they don't need to go to school.
Although Winslet's performance is absorbing and flushed with vitality, her character is shallow and self-absorbed -- a rudderless, ripening European seeking spiritual enlightenment by dabbling in Eastern religion.
Having left her philandering long-term lover in London, she has landed in a commune in Marrakech and sells handmade dolls in the streets for pocket change. After developing a romance with a handsome, staid, lower caste street performer (Said Taghmaoui), the make-shift family vagabonds around the countryside.
But her 7- and 8-year-old daughters (Bella Riza, Carrie Mulan) crave some kind of normalcy and long to return to England -- especially elder, stalwart Bea, who insists on attending school and decides on her own to stay with family friends when her mother goes traipsing off again after a period of relative stability.
Bea is by far the story's most sensible character, making the movie play at times like a humorless "Absolutely Fabulous -- The Early Years," with Winslet as a young Edina and Riza as a grammar school Saffie.
The film's disarmingly natural performances from Winslet, Taghmaoui and both girls sustain the film for quite a while. Wonderfully picturesque desert vistas and a vivid sense of culture carry it a little further. But the pic's lack of momentum -- contracted from Winslet's character -- leaves the audience as stranded emotionally as the characters are geographically at times.
Maybe its me. Maybe I'm lacking the requisite experience to identify with the conflicted current and former free spirits in "Hideous Kinky" and "Metroland." But I'd prefer to think that I'm the one with the unencumbered view here, and that it's nostalgia, not good filmmaking, giving these movies resonance with Boomer critics.
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