On the Road In Marrakech

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It's a catchy title--Hideous Kinky--but it doesn't mean anything. It's just a nonsense phrase that sets two little girls named Lucy and Bea (Carrie Mullan and Bella Riza) to giggling. Certainly it doesn't catch the patient, tender tones of this gently exotic movie or the spirit of the girls' mum, Julia (Kate Winslet). "Sweetly addled" comes closer to the mark. Or maybe "daftly dreamy."

Back in the '70s, when Morocco was to the counterculture what France was to the Lost Generation of the 1920s--a place to find your bliss on an agreeable currency-exchange rate--Julia has dragged her kids from chilly London to sunny Marrakech, where she vaguely hopes to achieve spiritual transcendence by linking up with the mystical Sufi sect. Unfortunately, the support checks from the girls' faraway father arrive only erratically. Julia takes up with a sometime acrobat named Bilal (Said Taghmaoui), whose charm is matched by his fecklessness. They are all blown this way and that by minor mishaps, passing acts of grace, and the suspense of the movie derives from our wondering whether Julia will come to her senses before irretrievable disaster overtakes these innocent adventurers.

The film's strength, however, comes from another place: the unblinking objectivity with which it views their trials. The children are not sentimentalized (though we worry about the emptiness of their days as they drag along in the grownups' wake). Bilal is not idealized (his generosity is balanced--or maybe one should say unbalanced--by his impetuosity), and neither is Julia. Caring and good-natured though she is, we can't help being disturbed by the fact that all her motherly alarm bells seem to be disabled.

Looking chunky and suburban, yet glowing with hope, Winslet is the opposite of her Titanic character. There she grasped heedlessly at her destiny; here her reach is more tentative, her manner more reactive than active. There's bravery in that acting choice, and in the refusal of director Gillies MacKinnon, working from a script adapted by his brother Billy of a novel by Esther Freud, either to romanticize or trash the hippie past. They permit us to see it for what it was--another silly, doomed, very human attempt to evade responsibility's inescapable embrace.

--By Richard Schickel