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Verdict: Plenty of fire — and fireworks — in this "Smoke."

Details: Starring Kate Winslet. Rated R for strong sexuality and profanity. 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: A lot of "Holy Smoke" is about how humans blow smoke at each other — sexually, spiritually, emotionally; through relationships, through religion, through family.

But at its white-hot core, Jane Campion's film — her riskiest since "Sweetie" — is a disturbingly primal battle of the sexes, so savage, surprising and, at times, searingly funny that it makes Sam Shepard's forays into similar territory look positively sentimental.

Ruth Barron (Kate Winslet) is an outgoing, free-spirited Australian girl who goes to India with a buddy. The friend comes back by herself and, in a traumatized whisper, tells Ruth's family that their daughter has joined a cult. "We wanted to visit a live guru," she explains regretfully. "You know, for a laugh."

To the Barrons, this is no laughing matter. Mom (Julie Hamilton) takes off for India and lures Ruth home with a lie about her father's health. The next step is to hire P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel), an expensive American "exit counselor" who has successfully "exited" 189 people from cults. He takes Ruth to an isolated outback cabin where, he claims, he will break down her defenses in three days.

But Ruth proves a complex case and, before long, we're not sure who's going to deprogram whom.

That P.J. has an Achilles' heel in his crotch area is made immediately clear when Ruth's randy sister-in-law gives him oral sex his first night on the job. That Ruth will act on this weakness is made clear when she realizes that her other strategies — reason, faith, cleverness, acting out, stubbornness, whatever — won't work. Sexuality, Campion tells us, is still the ultimate female trump card.

The filmmaker is both scrupulously fair and scrupulously brutal in her depiction of Ruth and P.J. He's like a diminutive Johnny Cash: a strutting bantam cock in a black shirt, cowboy boots and too-tight jeans that emphasize his middle-aged paunch. She is less physically ridiculous — Winslet is actually fetching in her sari — but her proclamations about Baba and the world in general come off as naive at best, hippie-imbecilic at worst.

The Barron family seems to have dropped in from another movie altogether. They're tacky middle-class caricatures and more than a tad eccentric (a live sheep serves as a dip table). The dichotomy in tone is initially jarring, an overdone weakness in an otherwise relentless film. But Campion saw that leaving us locked up with Ruth and P.J. for the entire movie would be too much. The nutty Barrons may not be the right relief, but at least they offer relief of some sort.

As for the two stars, this is among the best work either has ever done. P.J.'s transformation is as spooky as it is clownish. "I was young once and handsome," he insists. "You would've been impressed."

"I wasn't born! " she shoots back.

Winslet's performance is equally daring in its raw, naked power — both emotionally and physically. With a survivor's cunning, she bluntly confronts her captor, asking casually, "Do you like my personality or my breasts best?"

"Holy Smoke" is a demanding and often perverse picture. But its sense of itself is exhilarating. In a very odd way, it could be seen as a "Taming of the Shrew" for the 21st century.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service

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