Hideous Kinky (1999)

Directed by Gillies MacKinnon
Written by Billy MacKinnon, based on the novel by Esther Freud
Starring Kate Winslet, Saïd Taghmaoui, Bella Riza, Carrie Mullan, Sira Stampe

My Advice: Wait for MST3K.

Julia (Winslet) is a young mother with two fine daughters, Bea (Riza) and Lucy (Mullan), both out of wedlock with a poet/writer in London.  She lives with her daughters in Morocco, and during a quest for her own truths she sacrifices her daughters' comfort, safety and almost their sanity toward her own incompetent ends.

Now this is a study in a film that should not have been made.  Never before have I seen a film of a woman seeking her own spirituality that was more uninspiring and unwatchable.  The story is pretty much as outlined above, and serves no purpose that anyone can figure out.  Why Winslet chose this project as her followup to Titanic is a mystery to me seeing as how the film is nothing more than a loose series of meaningless vignettes that somehow manage to string together in some modicum of a unconvincing narrative.  Bea, unhappy with being abandoned by her mother, grabs a dirt clot off of one side of a wall and drops it off the other side several stories to smash into the ground.  End of scene.  Excuse me?  Oh I'm sorry, I don't understand what any of this is for, it must be art.  Pardon the hell out of me.

Both of the girls were very good in their roles as Mummy's luggage, and you can't help but feel sorry for their characters, drug selfishly all over the place while Mummy looked for truth, stupidly ignoring the two bundles of truth that she had given birth to.  It's disgusting and therefore Winslet's performance is completely swallowed by your contempt for her character.  Not helping our lack of respect for her is how quickly she jumps in the sack (and gets conveniently a chance to show Winslet's breasts) with Balil (Taghmaoui) a street perfomer/criminal.  For a movie about pilgrimage, it does nothing to address spiritual malaise and goes nowhere.  After sitting through the entire film, I can truthfully say that there is nothing whatsoever to recommend anyone else copying me on that action, other than flat out masochism. And it has probably the worst title of the year.  See if it doesn't win a Widgett Award for that later on.