Divine Enlightenment

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Harvey Keitel enters the movie wearing snakeskin cowboy boots and an arrogant attitude. Before it's over, he'll be wearing a red dress, lipstick and an air of considerable moral confusion.

Kate Winslet comes on as a dull yet impressionable girl seeking spiritual redemption in the ashram of a slightly suspect Indian maharishi. Before Holy Smoke! ends, she will be found wandering the Australian outback, naked as a jaybird and horny as a toad, seeking quite a different sort of redeeming experience.

How Keitel, playing P.J. Waters, an American who specializes in deprogramming youthful cult followers at the behest of their parents, and Winslet, as Australian Ruth Baron, who specializes mainly in self-absorption, find themselves alone in a shack, arguing for one another's souls, is the substance of Jane Campion's curiously exhilarating and often quite funny film.

Indeed, it represents something of a leap forward for Campion from the strained improbabilities of The Piano, the choked feminism of Portrait of a Lady. There's a looseness about Holy Smoke! that's not quite improvisatory but not entirely locked down either. This spirit freshens the film and gives it somewhat the quality of being surprised at its own journey.

That begins with Ruth's conventionally disorganized family. Their morality is determinedly conventional, but their hypocrisies are many. Mom (Julie Hamilton) is a caregiver, though given to hysteria. Dad (Tim Robertson) is a secret womanizer. One of their boys is gay, and they have a daughter-in-law obsessed with sex. You can see why Ruth, on a visit to India, is drawn to her maharishi's promises of peace and purity.

You can also see why the family is drawn to P.J. He's a no-nonsense, know-it-all kind of guy, a typical New York City type. His strategy with creatures like Ruth is simply to isolate them in a one-on-one situation and impose his formidable will on their confusions.

The thing is, though, that Ruth--as presented in the script written by Campion and her sister Anna, and as embodied by Winslet--is not as pliable as she appears. There's real need in her desire to escape the crushing banality of her family, and a real willingness to experiment with alternatives--especially P.J.

He's surely drawn to her, but it's equally certain she's the seducer here. And something more than that too. She's the true reprogrammer, getting the macho P.J. quite hilariously, yet quite sweetly, in touch with his feminine side. Their sexual battle is fierce and believable. The befuddlement of her family is told with unpatronizing honesty. And, best of all, both combatants emerge, finally, as better people--more tolerant, more human. That goes for Campion too. Her film may contain a kind of feminist parable, but she's less tense about it than she has been, more open in the exploration of her characters and more wayward (and charming) in the way she permits them to develop.

--By Richard Schickel