Jane Campion returns in Holy Smoke with a grand gesture to the waywardness and absurdity of her striking début Sweetie. With two major stars, Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel, and an evidently lavish budget, she has made an uncompromising and wayward comedy, in which there is also room for complexity and emotion. Winslet plays the Australian girl Ruth who becomes obsessed by guru/sect leader Baba during a holiday in India. This makes her family despair. Her mother travels to India to save her and persuades her to return to Australia by telling a lie. There the deception is soon discovered. Ruth is ready to return to the realm of master Baba, when the family turns up with an expensive American specialist, the macho sect exorcist PJ Waters, played in a hilarious and phenomenal way by Harvey Keitel. This PJ, a cross between a cowboy and a psychiatrist, regards isolation and interrogations bordering on torture as standard methods. The attractive and intelligent Ruth is however not easy to talk round. PJ falls victim to his own sexual lusts – and that is one of the lessons that Campion wants to give us with this film. PJ may later regret his weakness, it provides the viewer with some very original and entertaining moments.
