It s entirely possible that Holy Smoke should have remained a novel, where its exchanges of ideas and dabblings in absurdity might have been more palatable. In any event, there s not much story here to power a novel or a film. Reading this, you may think Holy Smoke sounds interesting, and writing it, I m tempted to go easy on the film. You feel you d have to be one of the Campion sisters to fully decode the film. And there doesn t seem to be enough there to justify the mental gymnastics of interpretation.
Campion remains a gifted pure filmmaker.
It s an unreasonably funny moment, bordering on prankish, and yet Harvey Keitel has seldom had a cooler introduction. It s a scene Quentin Tarantino would be proud to have thought of. We get the point, but a movie by its very nature literalizes whatever it shows us, so what we see is not Man giving up his devotion to the cult of machismo, but just Harvey Keitel grovelling in a dress. They get an intriguing, erotic rhythm going. But what they say to each other mostly sounds like feminist platitudes circa 1972, even though the movie is set in the present.