*
Cast: Kate Winslet, Said Taghmaoui, Pierre Clementi.
Director: Gillies MacKinnon
Rating: M
Reviewer: Greg Dixon
There are gods to be found in deserts. Gods and truths.
Certainly Julia (a mannered Winslet) thinks so as she drags her two young children around a chaotic Marrakech and the vast, dreary deserts of Morocco and Algeria in this
chaotic, dreary search for a hippie enlightenment.
It's 1972, so our received social history tells us it's the thing to do.
But for a 90s audience - with all our post-modern cynicism (read: glad we're not a baby-boomer) - it's not too much to ask why.
Gillies MacKinnon, the director whose last film was a tight, nuggety, minor masterpiece called Small Faces, never lets us in on the secret. We're left to assume that, well, it's just a cliche, it's just what you did in the 60s and 70s. Guess you had to be there.
All we know is she's left a wayward partner and London because the city (and you assume her other half) are "cold, cold and sad."
Her grumpy kids have only found an Africa which is warm, sad and short on money. All that leaves is a desperate escape (funded by the thieving, but good-hearted Bilal) back home to Blighty - something, that despite the belated cheques from her ex, feels to her like a sell-out.
Julia is, undoubtedly, a strange sort of creature. Her inner quest is for a Sufi "annihilation of the ego." Her outer meander through Easternism and Northern Africa leaves her Arab lover Bilal (Taghmaoui, last seen in Hate), her children and ultimately herself in a desert of selfishness.
That's not enough to make this film work. The only real truth is found in the rich Moroccan landscape of a friend's palatial home. Slouched one of its easy chairs, the local taxman calls Sufism - the enlightenment she craves - "our country's tragedy, this escapism." Julia just can't see it.
God, don't you hate hippies.
