Film byJonathan Romney
For marketing reasons, it makes sense that Gillies MacKinnon's film Hideous Kinky has retained the title of the autobiographical novel by Esther Freud on which it's based. In France, however, they've had the inspiration to rename it Marrakech Express, which pinpoints the subject-matter perfectly, echoing that smarmy Crosby, Stills &Nash song and the hippie-trail dream of mysticism, balmy sunsets and whatever herbal stupor you could afford on the change from a Eurorail ticket.
At least one review has already compared the film to the pricelessly excruciating Moroccan episode of Absolutely Fabulous. But nothing in Hideous Kinky exploits our appetite for kitsch - not even the dress sense. We're not invited to laugh at Kate Winslet as an early 1970s mother in a flowing jellaba, just to be aware that she's trying to invent a new identity through a fancy game of dressing-up as she drags her two young daughters, Bea and Lucy, across Morocco.
The film is less a child's-eye view than Freud's book, which was narrated by the younger daughter. The MacKinnons - director Gillies and screenwriter brother Billy - open the story up to a deeper ironic perspective: no longer trammelled by a Swallows and Amazons tone, it shifts its focus to the mother, who acquires a name (Julia) and becomes more of a character in her own right, a misguided but sympathetic product of her time, with emotional and imaginative appetites that, though confused, never appear ridiculous.
We never know what it was that Julia has left behind, but we see the cultural baggage that her generation has brought to Morocco. Julia is just one of the frazzled pilgrims on the Morocco trail, themselves inheriting from the earlier Paul Bowles generation of litterateurs in exile - represented here by the svelte Santoni (Pierre Clementi). He invites them to his palace, a haven of bohemian urbanity - but later, when it comes to the crunch, the haven has vanished, the party has moved on. It's remarkable how much more level-headed about cultural tourism this film is than Bertolucci's Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky, which pitched its orientalist camp one oasis away from Mills & Boon territory.
At every turn, the film reminds us how much we're inclined to buy into the exotic dream, together with the fears that accompany it. In this sense, it pointedly parts company with Freud's book, which tends, in its breathless impressionism, to embrace the myth - for example, "the heavy, sweeping sounds of Egyptian music wove magic into the air like scent". In the film, when Julia declares her intention to join the Sufi faith, a sceptical Moroccan taxman shakes his head: "Our country's tragedy - this escapism." Even Bea's horror story about discipline in an Islamic school is undercut by her "just joking". Morocco thus becomes a more concrete, less exotic place than in the book and, crucially, a culture with its own voice. Despite the fantasies that Europeans bring with them, it's a place of mundane routine, where life comes to focus on anxieties about laundry.
Julia's lover Bilal (SaId Taghmaoui, from La Haine) is less the book's wayward street spirit, more a working stiff prepared to try any scam to make a living. He, too, becomes part of the family's workaday domesticity, even if Julia and the daughters are all too inclined to see him as an exotic guardian. There's a certain melodrama about the romance - beefed up from the book - that the film doesn't have time to handle adequately. But the MacKinnons scrupulously reveal screen dreams of the Arabic as colonial fantasy: Bilal does indeed turn up as a dashing knight in spectacular colours, but only because he's donned the livery of a heritage entertainment for tourists.
The drive, on the whole, is against exoticism: cinematographer John de Borman provides beautiful, hotly coloured interiors and landscape compositions, but in general they're just prosaic enough not to look like postcard shots. Kate Winslet, of course, carries an exoticism of her own, her post-Titanic star quality. But she sloughs off that burden to return to the troubled corporeality she showed in Jude: it's rare to find a star willing to sweat and flush as she does, really letting the emotional cracks show through. The children are also remarkable - there's a brisk, mercurial tension between Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan, and between them and their confusing, alluring new world.
The pop-heavy soundtrack for once works to good effect, tapping the nature of the hippie dream: the songs by Richie Havens, the Incredible String Band, Canned Heat et al highlight a whole landscape of beatific imaginings. Occasionally, the film has the polished assurance of a prestige production carried off efficiently - and films such as Small Faces and even the underrated Trojan Eddie show that MacKinnon can be a much more personal stylist than this film suggests. At its best, Hideous Kinky reconciles the commercial imperatives of spectacle with an acute eye for the stresses of British cultural fantasy. It's a film that succeeds in giving us the scenic route, but on a non-tourist itinerary.
"Hideous Kinky" (15) opens on 5 February at selected cinemas nationwide
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