But Waters wants her to turn her back on all of that. We get to the crux of the story when Ruth is forced to live holed up in an isolated shack with Waters for three days while he does his deprogramming. But Waters gets more than he bargains for. Campion makes this story real and genuine with a lot of different kinds of heat-the sweltering streets of India, the unrelenting sun of the Australian desert. Everybody glistens, mops their forehead or just drips.
Campion is adept at creating a certain film funk.
And of course there is the emotional heat and funk. In the Australian shack, we are given a quickly drawn map of emotions-human will, commitment, passion, frailty. It tells us that unexpected things can happen when you start stripping away the emotional layers of others. You might wind up stripped yourself. And when you mix emotional exploration with good old-fashioned lust, you might just find yourself whipped.