Hideous Kinky (1998)

Nasrudin was in a patent office trying to patent a magic wand.

“I’m sorry,” said the clerk, “ we don’t patent impossible inventions.”

So Nasrudin waved his magic wand and the clerk disappeared.

After the huge international success of Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio’s next project was The Beach. It was a mediocre product for which he received a somewhat-better-than-mediocre seven-figure salary. DiCaprio’s Titanic co-star Kate Winslet probably could have similarly capitalized on her star status. She chose her craft instead. Her next project was Hideous Kinky (1998), a small British-French co-production about a Sixties flower child, Julia, adrift with two children of her own in the very alien world of Morocco in 1972. It’s a tribute to Winslet’s versatility as an actor that the two women of Titanic and Hideous Kinky are so utterly dissimilar. The same integrity Kate Winslet demonstrated in choosing a small film in which to act instead of coasting on her celebrity suffuses the entire production of Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon’s seventh independent film.

A comment about the title. It comes from a nonsense word-game played by Julia’s young daughters. Two exotic words that fit their exotic world. They use them as a kind of mantra to focus their very active imaginations, ward off harm, and express joy. The two girls are marvelous storytellers. When six-year-old Lucy asks eight-year-old Bea if she’s heard the story of the sinister Black Hand, Bea replies: “One thousand three hundred times. Anyway, go on!”

I loved the acting in this film. Winslet is totally convincing as a young woman whose honest-but-confused search for a new life and a higher truth endangers those she most loves. You might at times doubt her judgment, but you never question her inner and outer strength or the connection with her children. In their first on-screen roles, Carrie Mullan as Lucy and Bella Riza as Bea never strike a false note in performances rich in confusion, vulnerability, love, anger, fantasy and wry humor. Saïd Taghmaoui (last seen in Three Kings), portraying Julia’s somewhat hapless Moroccan lover, is a perfect incarnation of North Africa’s complex blend of Muslim, French, and Western cultures. Taghnaoui is another versatile actor. The gentle soul he plays here is a far cry from the chilling street punk he played in the powerful French film La Haine (Hatred) in 1995.

North African culture is the other starring character in Hideous Kinky. A lot of foreign film crews have used North Africa as a setting, but Hideous Kinky is the first non-North African film shot there that is actually about North Africa. The director clearly respects and admires the culture. One of Gillies MacKinnon’s smartest decisions was not to subtitle incidental Arabic dialogue. Like Julia, we are strangers in a strange land. However open one may be, without the language of the country there are doors that will not open. Julia’s children are wonderfully sensitive to this. Bea insists that her mother send her to a local school; Lucy, whether wrapping a turban around her head or repeating a Muslim blessing, immerses herself in the world which flows around her. Julia is trying to find herself; her daughters have beaten her to it. However homesick for London and a “normal” life they may sometimes be, the girls’ picaresque stay in Marrakech is their “Open Sesame” into the culture which produced both the Koran and The Thousand and One Nights.

I also loved the soundtrack. Segueing from Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat, and Richie Havens, to Jil Jilala, Kalifa Ould Eide, and Rabih Abou-Kahlil, it’s my kind of musical road trip. One moment you’re listening to an old man in Marrakech’s marketplace play traditional Arabic folk songs on a busted electric guitar, the next moment Grace Slick is superimposed on the Moroccan mountains, where a stupefied expat communes with oblivion in the back of a careening dump truck.

Do I risk raising some snooty eyebrows by saying Hideous Kinky looks like an hour and a half of National Geographic? I hope not. Every National Geographic photo is the end result of a selection process that can whittle ten thousand photographs down to a dozen. That’s craft, not luck. Hideous Kinky, shot by cinematographer John de Borman, is similarly crafted in every frame. It is a feast for the eye as well as the heart. Borman and MacKinnon both have a painter’s eye for color; Marrakech is awash in it. The last film where I so appreciated looking at composition was Jane Campion’s The Piano, sort of a “Mr. Hyde” to Kinky’s “Dr. Jekyll.” John de Borman deservedly won the 1998 British Film Award for Best Technical/Artistic Achievement.

Echoing the director’s own words, I’ve got to add that Hideous Kinky is not a travelogue with a story pasted over it. No amount of scenery can make you care about characters if they don’t stand on their own. And even the Marrakech you do see in the film is partly a storyteller’s illusion: “We built the entire Medina [market] from nothing. We went from an empty square, we brought everybody from the existing Medina that we wanted in busloads with all their things, then reconstructed it entirely. Almost everything in the film has been built or renovated or brought in. Somebody said, ‘Did you just point the camera and shoot there?’ I thought, I have to take this as a compliment.”

Hideous Kinky communicates some honest lessons about the rewards and trials of the expatriate experience. Anyone who has ever spent a year or more trying to adapt to a foreign land knows that the experience enriches one’s whole life. It can also mean injured pride, heartbreak, loss, helplessness, isolation, and fear. Kinky is based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Esther Freud, the wife of British painter Lucien Freud and the granddaughter of Sigmund. Esther’s mother had taken her and her sister to Marrakech under circumstances similar to Julia’s.

Do parents have the right to drag their children into potential danger in their stumbling searches for a better life? Julia is penniless (a fact which astonishes her lover, who has never imagined that an English woman could be without money). Bea almost dies of a streptococcus infection that Julia doesn’t have the money to cure. Asked at one point what she wants most of all, Bea answers: “To be normal.” Julia is not unaware of the risks, even though they don’t fully sink in until Bea’s illness and her near-disappearance when left with fair-weather friends. And in the end, for her children’s sake, Julia is forced to retreat. But the same mother’s instinct that almost fails her in fully registering risks tells her she’s also giving her children something more than she could have ever given them by staying in a one-room flat in London and spending 12-hour days in a dead-end job.

I think Hideous Kinky is a very, very fine family film. It’s bound to provoke some interesting discussions. Julia tells Lucy and Bea that it’s quite common for daughters to be embarrassed by their mothers. Some would argue that she steps far beyond the lines of mere embarrassment. In an interview at Sundance, MacKinnon said that the real Freud sisters found their time in Morocco to have been a wonderful experience, and that they grew up to be incredibly loyal to their mother. But he also added, “Yet there’s always a danger in the true adventure…..There’s also the question of parenthood. I have two children and you ask yourself, y’know, was I too cautious? Could I have been a little more adventurous? Could I have shown them something more?”

Please don’t be fooled by the film’s ridiculous “R” rating. You’ve got to admire the hypocrisy of a rating system that implies that Hideous Kinky, with everything it has to say about families and the window it opens onto North African society, poses more of a threat to the sensitivities of young people than a “PG” film with hecatombs of violent death or smirking sexual innuendo. Kinky is given an “R” because of a 30-second exposure of breasts, a 5-second exposure of gluteus maximus, two F-words, and a couple “bloody ‘ells.” Bloody ‘ell, whatever happened to common sense? Hideous Kinky never relies on violent confrontation to further its story, addresses moral issues head on, and has two of the best children’s performances in recent memory. Yea, let’s give it the same rating as Starship Troopers and Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Looking Back & Second Thoughts

Most of us wouldn’t have a hard time making a long list of things we’re grateful to our parents for. Many of us also have a shorter list of things for which we’ve had to forgive them. And when we were young, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two. What our parents considered an adventure or a new beginning might have seemed to us, at the time, to be chaos and confusion. Throw in geographical and cultural displacement, and chaos and confusion can become indistinguishable from trauma. Julia and her daughters, adrift in Morocco in the early 70s, experience such trauma and are fortunate enough to pass beyond it, first to forgiveness and then to gratitude. I still love this film, with its superb performances, its honesty, and its impressive cinematography. Hideous Kinky is a deliberately immersive experience, with no translation of the incidental Arabic dialogue. The audience understands as much or, more often, as little as the three British expats.

Having praised the film’s immersive quality, I do have a bone to pick with the soundtrack. I’m as much of a fan of Canned Heat, Richie Havens, and Jefferson Airplane as anyone who grew up in the Sixties, but why are they in this movie? The effect is jarring; it breaks the spell. I’d be very interested in hearing veteran composer John E. Keane’s explanation for his choices. The rock music selections outnumber the Arabic ones by more than 3 to 1. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

I’m still a big Kate Winslet fan. I’ve had several other occasions to review her work in this column. As I write this at the beginning of 2021, she has one Oscar, six other Academy nominations, 90 other acting awards, and 150 more nominations. Saïd Taghmaoui has 75 acting credits on Imdb, for work as varied as The Kite Runner and Wonder Woman. I particularly remember him in the 1995 French film La Haine. Hideous Kinky was Bella Riza’s only feature film; Carrie Mullan made one other feature film in 2001, and has done some television work. Given the quality of their performances in Hideous Kinky, I’m surprised that they didn’t take full-on careers in film. Of Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon’s 30 Imdb credits, most have been for work in television.

I’m afraid this reflection remains sadly incomplete. I know little more about Sufism than I did back in 2000, and I haven’t had the chance to read Esther Freud’s novel. I have some homework to do. The Kindle edition of Hideous Kinky is now on my iPad; books by Rumi and Idries Shah are on my library shelves.

Hideous Kinky currently has a (to me) surprisingly low Imdb rating of 6.0. What’s going on here? Something must have pissed a lot of people off. Even Step by Step, an obscure, paint-by-numbers thriller from 1946 scores 6.3. Did I miss something? Perhaps viewers simply dismissed Julia as a bad parent, reflecting their disapproval in their scores? Maybe they were expecting a follow-up to Titanic from the year prior? Reading through all of the User Reviews on Imdb, a lot of viewers seemed to take offense at a perceived lack of plotting. Go figure.

Movie Information

Genre: Drama
Director: Gilles MacKinnon
Actors: Kate Winslet, Carrie Mullan, Bella Riza, Saïd Taghmaoui
Year: 1998
Country:
Original Review: November 2000

Cyberspace:

The One and Only Saul Turrell

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5286-flashback-the-one-and-only-saul-turell

This is Peter Cowie’s tribute to the man who, along with his partner, William Becker, helped made Janus Films one of the world’s great distributers of classic films. In my teens, it was Janus films on PBS that opened my eyes to world cinema—artistic epiphanies for a small-town boy. The imposing 50 Years of Janus Films box set has had a privileged place in my library for many, many years. Saul Turrell won an Oscar in 1980 for Best Documentary, Short Subjects for Paul Robeson: Tribute to an Artist. That film is currently available on the Criterion Channel (along with the rest of Janus collection).

28 Days, 28 Films for Black History Month

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/01/movies/28-essential-films-black-history-month.html?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_fm_20180202&nl=movies-update&nlid=7605539&ref=headline&te=1

An annotated list compiled by The New York Times film critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, this could be an entire course in 20^th century Black American cinema. The list begins with Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates from 1920, and ends with Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman from 1996.

Seven totally racist movies your parents love

https://www.salon.com/2018/02/03/racist-movies/?page=1

A somewhat different annotated list from the one above, this one compiled by Gabriel Bell for Salon.com, and with the sub-heading: “They’re beautiful. They’re classics. They’re essential cinema. They’re racist.” Any guesses?

Films Worth Talking About:

Pleasantville, Saving Private Ryan, A Simple Plan, Happiness, Elizabeth, Babe: Pig in the City, Shakespeare in Love, Life is Beautiful, Primary colors, Character, High Art, Men With Guns, Pi, The Truman Show, Antz, A Bug’s Life, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Mulan, The Prince of Egypt, Affliction, Clockwatchers, Déjà vu, Insomnia, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Love is the Devil, Nil by Mouth, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, Your Friends and Neighbors, Zero Effect, Beloved, Drifting Clouds, Hilary and Jackie, Living Out Loud, Love and Death on Long Island, Out of Sight, The Spanish Prisoner, There’s Something About Mary, The Thin Red Line, What Dreams May Come, Fallen Angels, Buffalo ’66, Fireworks, The Last Days of Disco, Funny Games, Taste of Cherry, The Celebration, The Big Lebowski, Rushmore, Waking Ned Devine, Following, The Idiots, The City of Lost Children, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, American History X, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, He Got Game, Ronin, Flowers of Shanghai, After Life, Eternity and a Day, Central Station, Run Lola Run, Patch Adams, [Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels]. Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Very Bad Things, The Legend of 1900, Stepmom, The Miracle of P. Tinto, [Black Cat, White Cat], The Negotiator, One True Thing, Blade, [Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley], Sliding Doors, Little Voice, Under the Sun, Deep Impact, Ever After: A Cinderella Story, Apt Pupil3 A Civil Action, Judas Kiss, Godzilla, The Parent Trap, Wild Things, The Waterboy, Simon Burch, Divorce Iranian Style, Deep Rising, Rounders, BASEketball, Fallen, Small Soldiers, Croupier, The Interview, The Opposite of Sex, Pecker, Orphans, Gods and Monsters, Dark City, Smoke Signals, Rupert’s Land

The Bigger Picture

Films:

Music: Gnawa: Music from Morocco; Arabian Music from Morocco; The Music of Islam; Arabian Nights: Music from the World of Islam (1976)

Books: Esther Freud, Hideous Kinky; Idries Shah, The Way of the Sufi; Idries Shah, The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Sasrudin

The Word on the Street

“Hideous Kinky” serves as a reminder of something that seems shocking now — just 30 years ago, a whole class of educated Western women sought enlightenment, and even liberation, in Islam. One wonders: what became of these women? Did they remain in Islam? Have they survived the rising tide of fundamentalism? And what of their children? What is their cultural legacy? What burdens do they bear? [PaulineDorchester]

The perfect movie for me does a few things. The first is that it should take me some place that I have never been: not just a strange location, but a perspective with exotic causalities. It should be deeply self-referential, in that the form of the cinematic vision should convey as much or more than the `story.’ The images must captivate and flow, and a significant part of that is the image presented by the actors. [tedg]

“Hideous Kinky” is not a plot-driven movie but more of a meditation on time and place. And I can live with that. The photography is so rich with colors and beautiful locales, I want to visit Morrocco. The acting in splendid across the board with particular note to the two young girls who were handed quite a bit of duty with the roles. Where this movie failed me is in the character played by Kate Winslet. She behaves with such selfishness and stupidity–not once–but over and over again, that I really grew to dislike her. Sure…she may be a young, naive, adventurous, hippie in the early ’70’s, but a I refuse to believe she didn’t realize what kind of danger she was putting her children in. “Hideous Kinky” is a good movie–not great. And it’s good for one viewing, maybe two for the cinematography. [atrain224]

The feel of place in the film is astonishing. Marrakech, with the narrow streets and courtyards of its old town, dark and forbidding, but also revealing wonder, and the surrounding desert, are filmed deliciously with ambition and assurance. Julia, as well as being part of the ‘drop out’ European expat community, finds herself accessing different strands of Moroccan society, the common society of Morocco via her relationship with Bilal, a shady character who turns out to be a convict, played wonderfully by Said Taghmaoui, and the higher rungs via her ex-husband’s friend, Santoni.
Central to the film- and what also complicates it, giving it an added, new dimension- is Julia’s relationship with her two children, played astoundingly well by Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan. They, in turn, have their own incredible experiences, good and bad, as shown by their delightful but confused sayings. Julia, unusually in film, is a complex female character with many shades. She is naïve, foolish and irresponsible. At one point, she even manages to lose one of her daughters. But she is also smart, soulful and canny, and from her time in Morrocco, Julia does gain an insight into her self, but it is not the insight that she expected, and perhaps it is a genuine insight for that reason. She is played by Kate Winslet with characteristic heart and intelligence, and a brave choice as she had just come off the safety of the glitzy but vacuous blockbuster, Titanic. [Afzal-s2007]

This movie addresses the search for spiritual meaning that propelled thousands of western hippies to North Africa and India in the late sixties and early seventies. Although the brain-dead hippie stereotypes are there, often with comedic effect, the narration follows Julie, a single mother played aptly by Kate Winslet, and her two young daughters on a quest for transcendental knowledge around Marrakech Morocco and the nearby villages. Although this is not Winslet’s strongest performance (see Hamlet or Quills)her craftsmanship is superb in conveying the emotional turmoil that follows the trail of her character. Is Julie merely escaping from the drudgery of a cold water flat and a fourteen hour workday day in South London or is she on a serious path to spiritual awakening? Is she exposing her children to undue danger in a strange land or is she leading them on the adventure of a lifetime? Has she found the love of her life and a surrogate father for her daughers or has she thrust them into the hands of a polygamist bandit? [roger_hart201]

I lived in Morocco between the fall of 1971 and the spring of 1972, and thoroughly enjoyed this movie. They got it right – the sights, sounds and feel of the place. And like another British film, Withnail and I, they manage to convey the goofy absurdity of the sixties by focusing not on stereotypical hippies but actual flawed human beings. I’ve read a number of criticisms of this film, and can only say – I was there, and so was the author. If you weren’t, take our word for it – it was even more hideous kinky than you could ever imagine! [blyalls]

The film is handled with masterful style, and is often a great improvement on the novel. Many scenes are cut shorter and sometimes deleted (as they should be with a film adaptation), the faster pace therefore rendering the plot more interesting. The visually clever and sometimes awe-inspiring touches that occur in the film throughout also add depth, as does the film’s music, which effectively blends the traditional hippie atmosphere of the time with the country’s hypnotic rural rhythms. What’s more, the performances are first-rate all round, especially the two young actresses Bella Riza and Carrie Mulan (the film’s real stars), playing the two daughters aged 6 and 8…. [“boz”]

I came across the book via an entry in a book called “1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die”, which I have come to trust as a great pointer to entertaining works. The point-of-view in the book is rigidly and relentlessly that of the youngest daughter. And the picture that is painted from Lucia’s 5 year old perspective is done very simply and lightly, with no deviation into a more adult rendering of the events. There are no “aha” moments, no coming-of-age realizations…just a world-view of a 5 year old girl, where anything and everything is already fantastical and enchanting. [tommackay]

Tree-Hugging Hippie Crap [DTTbean]