At this date the film was not doing well at the box office relatively few theaters in Australia were carrying it, and the impressive Crunulla Cinema Centre sold only 8 or 9 tickets to the show we attended. The film portrays the dark passage to self-knowledge of a young Australian woman, Ruth, impressively played by Kate Winslet. Her Sydney-based, dysfunctional family hears that Ruth joined a guru s cult in India. P.J. gets 10,000 dollars to take the case. The movie opens with a dramatic flow of travel scenes of Ruth in India with her girlfriend.
Campion captures some of colorful, people-rich New Delhi.
A curious Indian man standing behind Ruth on a crowded bus sneaks a hand to feel the sexy foreigner s blonde hair. She is not amused. Ruth appears to be a spacey, impressionable girl at this stage, curious about some happy western girls dressed in saris. So we are not too surprised that she falls in love with a holy man, Baba, after encountering his gaze at his ashram. Ruth is immediately smitten by an electric experience illustrated by psychedelic imagery.