Holy Smoke (1999)
Directed by Jane Campion
While on a journey of discovery in exotic India, beautiful young Ruth Barron falls under the influence of a charismatic religious guru. Her desperate parents then hire PJ Waters, a macho cult de-programmer who confronts Ruth in a remote desert hideaway. But PJ quickly learns that he's met his match in the sexy, intelligent and iron-willed Ruth.
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What critics compared Holy Smoke to
The film comes to feel like a woman's rewriting of Last Tango in Paris , with Winslet fearlessly plumbing emotional depths surprising for an actress so young.
We get a sexual power play that's close to the heart of Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) by visual way of Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970).
It's a topic that's been handled in films before, perhaps most notably in Jane Campion's "Holy Smoke," but Durkin offers the most persuasively believable peek into the psyche of such a character I've ever seen.
But if you hanker after distaff questers who are truly hot for God or wisdom or something that passes for transformative experience, buy a ticket to travel instead with Adela Quested ( Judy Davis ) in " A Passage to India " ... or Kate Winslet 's "goddess" in " Holy Smoke " ... or Nicole Kidman 's dreamer in " The Portrait of a Lady " ... or Patricia Arquette 's Red Cross Knight in the mythic " Beyond Rangoon ."
Not unlike Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke, this foray into into a private and isolated therapy session leads to disaster: the confrontation of a professional with the ethics of profession and the “patient” with the nature of her identity.