“Hideous kinky!” shout two little girls gleefully, leaning out of a train window, and in this quirky, innocent catchphrase, the spirit that pervades this movie is encapsulated.
This is a year-long slice in the life of Julia (Kate Winslet), who has come to Morocco with her daughters, Bea and Lucy, to escape from a conventional, humdrum existence in London and get over her break-up with the girls’ father. Julia meets a young Moroccan, Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui), and the two embark on an affair. However, the focus is as much, if not more, on his relationships with the two girls as it is on romance.
Childhood is in fact a central theme of the film: we see Morocco through the eyes of the two girls, who bring to it a playful innocence rare in films these days (I know that makes me sound like an old fogey, but still), and which kept me smiling for the entire ninety-eight minutes.
Julia’s unconventionality and bohemian lifestyle reinforce the theme of youth and freedom from responsibility, as does the fact that Bilal turns out to be running away not only from family responsibilities, but the police.
70’s flower-power, and the vibrant, chaotic and colourful Moroccan culture seem the perfect combination for Julia, offering a moment-to-moment intensity of living echoed by Lucy and Bea’s experience. But Julia is also on a quest for some kind of spiritual fulfillment wherein the body and these ‘passing pleasures’can be transcended, a quest that, although not ultimately successful, teaches her something about the need to grow up and take care of her daughters’ needs even if this means no longer doing exactly what she likes when she likes. Bea and Bilal are also forced, in very different ways, to grow up and leave the world of childhood behind, but this is no traumatic rites of passage movie.
The film has something of a docu-soap feel to it, focusing not so much on intricacies of plot as on the day-to-day existence of the three main characters, and the effect that Morocco, personified by Bilal, has on their lives.
Kate Winslet successfully develops here the maternal role which was touched on in ‘Jude’: I had to keep reminding myself that Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan were not actually her children.
If the star of ‘Titanic’ was the ship, then by the same token perhaps the star of ‘Hideous Kinky’ is Morocco, though in that case Winslet (not as glam and packaged as she has been in previous films, but the more attractive for it) and her three co-stars come a pretty close second.
This is a year-long slice in the life of Julia (Kate Winslet), who has come to Morocco with her daughters, Bea and Lucy, to escape from a conventional, humdrum existence in London and get over her break-up with the girls’ father. Julia meets a young Moroccan, Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui), and the two embark on an affair. However, the focus is as much, if not more, on his relationships with the two girls as it is on romance.
Childhood is in fact a central theme of the film: we see Morocco through the eyes of the two girls, who bring to it a playful innocence rare in films these days (I know that makes me sound like an old fogey, but still), and which kept me smiling for the entire ninety-eight minutes.
Julia’s unconventionality and bohemian lifestyle reinforce the theme of youth and freedom from responsibility, as does the fact that Bilal turns out to be running away not only from family responsibilities, but the police.
70’s flower-power, and the vibrant, chaotic and colourful Moroccan culture seem the perfect combination for Julia, offering a moment-to-moment intensity of living echoed by Lucy and Bea’s experience. But Julia is also on a quest for some kind of spiritual fulfillment wherein the body and these ‘passing pleasures’can be transcended, a quest that, although not ultimately successful, teaches her something about the need to grow up and take care of her daughters’ needs even if this means no longer doing exactly what she likes when she likes. Bea and Bilal are also forced, in very different ways, to grow up and leave the world of childhood behind, but this is no traumatic rites of passage movie.
The film has something of a docu-soap feel to it, focusing not so much on intricacies of plot as on the day-to-day existence of the three main characters, and the effect that Morocco, personified by Bilal, has on their lives.
Kate Winslet successfully develops here the maternal role which was touched on in ‘Jude’: I had to keep reminding myself that Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan were not actually her children.
If the star of ‘Titanic’ was the ship, then by the same token perhaps the star of ‘Hideous Kinky’ is Morocco, though in that case Winslet (not as glam and packaged as she has been in previous films, but the more attractive for it) and her three co-stars come a pretty close second.