Harvey Keitel in lipstick and a dress is the sort of thing you might dream of seeing one day, and yet, like many things you have looked forward to for ages, there’s a certain let-down when it’s placed in front of you. There Harvey is, in drag, in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, wearing a go-to-hell little red number, with his rat-trap mouth and protruding lower lip sensually emphasised in scarlet. Disappointing, somehow.
His dangerous journey into his feminine side is supposed to be the devastatingly powerful yet heartbreakingly vulnerable moment for PJ, Keitel’s macho “exit counsellor”, who deprogrammes kidnapped cult victims. He is alone in the outback with Ruth (Kate Winslet), who has been conned into returning home to Australia from the clutches of her guru in India and now has to endure three days of tough love from Harvey in a remote hut that is to be her ideological depressurisation chamber. Naturally, Kate’s spirited refusal to bend to his will causes Harvey to question his own assumptions; then the intense sexual chemistry kicks off and we are in a new movie: Last Tango in South Australia. But who, as Marlon Brando might have asked, is wielding the butter?
It is on these terms that Harvey wears a dress and there’s something engaging about the sheer bizarreness of this image, and Keitel’s tough, actorly resolve in carrying it off.
Going out on a limb is one thing – but this is going out on a twig, going out on a leaf. And crashing to the ground. It is an absurd moment in an embarrassing, shallow film that manages to be vacuous and incoherent about everything it is nominally concerned with: Eastern spirituality, Western rationality, the possibility of sexuality as a liminal experience transcending both. (Although, despite the setting, Aboriginal culture is strangely absent from discussion.)
At the beginning of the movie, Ruth passionately insists that her guru has shown her something more real than the trite consumerist world back home. Her mother, Miriam (an excellent performance from Julie Hamilton), thinks he is a charlatan. Is he? We never find out. The movie never makes any serious attempt to dramatise or investigate these issues.
The face-off between PJ and Ruth appears to promise something interesting about Eastern mysticism versus the negligible spiritual content of Western culture. But this is smartly abandoned in favour of 9½ weeks of shagging – and cross-dressing. The twists and turns of PJ and Ruth’s humid confrontation seem bafflingly without context or motivation. They’re shouting at each other, or pouting, or throwing things, then they’re having tempestuous sex – and none of it is part of any remotely believable emotional narrative. Keitel and Winslet are two excellent actors who give their considerable best to Anna Campion’s script. But they’re like two astronauts, free-floating away from us.
Yet more exasperatingly, the movie throws away the talents of Pam Grier, who plays Carol, PJ’s deprogramming partner and significant other. Normally, she would undertake the deprogramming with PJ, but the plot contrives a mix-up so she is left at home in the US, and PJ and Ruth are left alone, thus leading to the impropriety. Carol is furious at the obvious signs of sex and stomps off back to Miriam’s house, but nothing more than impotent pique is required of this marvellous performer, and she is, at the end, reduced to saying the Lord’s Prayer along with Ruth’s mum in the kitchen as the terrible news of PJ’s illicit congress filters through – the crowning moment of awfulness.
In The Piano, Campion conjured up a similar mise-en-sc̬ne for its two principals, Keitel and Holly Hunter, but that was a commanding vision, always rooted in something concrete, and arose from an intelligible story. Holy Smoke, disappointingly, is just that: smoke Рsolemn, obscure and insubstantial.