If It’s Campion, Think Again

When eyes lock and sparks start to fly between Kate Winslet and Harvey Keitel in the new movie “Holy Smoke,” you can tell that what’s brewing isn’t your usual Hollywood May-December romance. You know, and not just because it’s a Jane Campion film, that something more interesting is in store.

Sure enough, the relationship unfolds in strange and unexpected ways in the film--can you imagine a love-smitten Keitel in a dress and lipstick? The movie grows increasingly wacky as it moves along, but all of it is in service to what Campion would call emotional truth.

One senses, sitting across from Campion in the clubby lobby of a Santa Monica hotel, that honesty is important to her. Without makeup, her blond, shoulder-length hair hanging free, she shows not a trace of self-consciousness or vanity. She has a plain-spoken friendliness and a vague outdoorsy look. She could’ve just stepped off a plane from Nebraska to attend an alfalfa growers’ convention.

Instead, the New Zealand native has flown here from Australia, where she lives, by way of New York City. She has been researching her upcoming movie there with the dirt-level zeal of an anthropologist while taking time out to lunch with the likes of Talk magazine editor Tina Brown and her literati friends.

All of Campion’s films (“Sweetie,” “Angel at My Table,” “The Piano,” “Portrait of a Lady”) have been poetic yet clear-eyed evocations of distinctively feminine concerns. Her next movie is something of a departure in that it will be an urban-based erotic thriller based on a best-selling book, “In the Cut.” She says she was drawn to it in part, though, because of the unflinching honesty with which it examines female sexuality.

That same honesty is present in “Holy Smoke,” which opens today in Los Angeles. Campion describes the movie, which she wrote with her sister, Anna, as “romantic,” although she acknowledges, “When I hear myself say that word I know there must be a catch in it somewhere.”

The “catch” is that Campion draws a parallel between romantic love and religious faith and suggests that the way to deeper realization of both realms is through absolute surrender.

The 24-year-old Winslet plays a headstrong Australian under the thrall of an Indian guru. Keitel, 60, is the American deprogrammer hired by her family to break her will. Instead, while holding her virtual prisoner in a remote cabin, he falls hopelessly in love. The movie winds up being about issues of power and control--and, yes, faith--as well as it is about a kind of romantic relationship far different than one might at first imagine.

“In a way,” Campion says of her characters, “they do have a spiritual experience together.” Winslet’s character honestly describes herself at one point as heartless. But the character Keitel plays is so in love with her that he allows her to show herself to him with all of her faults.

“She could be as beastly as she wanted, and he, out of his obsession or love or whatever, allowed her to do it,” Campion says. “It’s probably her first experience of being loved by somebody.

“She’s doing it because she wants to get out of the situation she’s in, but it leads to new things. Once she’s done it there’s a kind of humiliation involved in what she’s done. She’s tried to trade her body to save her mind, but that hurts. It becomes a kind of battle of wills. She cannot let it go. It’s like: ‘I’ve humiliated myself now, and I want you to pay. Because you don’t know what it felt like.’ ”

“Holy Smoke” is one of several movies this year that have taken fresh and honest looks at relations between the sexes, particularly between older men and younger women. It probably is no coincidence that “Holy Smoke,” like the others (“Guinevere” and “Sugar Town”), was written and directed by a woman.

In “Sugar Town,” the movie co-written and co-directed by Allison Anders and Kurt Voss, an aging rocker (Michael Des Barres) who is adverse to women his own age gets his comeuppance in a bar when he thinks a young woman is coming on to him, only to learn she’s been sent by her mother to get an autograph. He later has to be literally forced to have sex with a beautiful woman his own age (Beverly D’Angelo).

“Guinevere” is about the complicated relationship that develops between an older photographer (Stephen Rea) and his young protegee (Sarah Polley). Like “Holy Smoke,” the movie deals frankly with the unhealthiness of the relationship while also acknowledging the possibility of a deep, meaningful and lasting connection.

The romantic pairing of seasoned (that is to say, graying and wrinkled) men and luscious women half their age has long been commonplace in Hollywood, although it may have reached its height--or nadir--in recent years: “Bulworth,” “A Perfect Murder,” “True Crime,” “As Good as It Gets,” “Six Days, Seven Nights,” “The Horse Whisperer,” “Entrapment,” a good number of the movies Woody Allen’s made. The list goes on.

“Bulworth” smartly lampooned so many foibles of society that Campion says she assumed the Warren Beatty film would lampoon the idea of a romantic coupling between him and Halle Berry. “I couldn’t believe that they were going to ask us to take it seriously,” she says. “I just couldn’t believe it. . . .

“The whole point of aging is that you’ve got some difficult things you have to cross,” she says, contending that men who chase younger women are trying to stave off the reality of aging. “It’s good to cross those barriers, to know that you’ve grown older, that your concerns are going to change, that you’re forced to change them. . . . It’s not comfortable, but that’s part of maturing.”

When Campion sees all of the movies that portray men who are middle-aged and older having affairs with twentysomething women, she says she feels “ashamed and disappointed” in the filmmakers for the way they are using their power to influence audiences.

The movies portray a world that perhaps reflects the fantasies of the men who made them. Or maybe, because these men are rich and famous, the movies reflect reality as they know it. If so, she thinks it is an unhealthy reality.

“Let’s put it plainly,” Campion says. “If they weren’t rich and famous there’d be no way. That’s what [the women] are having their relationships with--their riches and their fame. They must know that.”

Those relationships are all about power, she says--the men with their money and influence, the women with their looks and youth. “It sounds pretty pathetic, doesn’t it, when you spell it out. So they’re going to play that [power] game together. And the ones of us that know we’re not going to fit into that, we can go and do our own games somewhere else.”

Next for Campion Is ‘In the Cut’

Campion’s next “game” will take her into the frightening sexual underworld of New York City. She recently signed a deal with Miramax (which distributed her last two movies) and Universal Pictures International to make “In the Cut,” an adaptation of the disturbing novel of the same name written by Susanna Moore.

The movie at first looks to be a stark departure for Campion, whose other movies have been iconoclastic in their structure and concerns. “In the Cut” is a genre thriller that features a serial killer stalking an unmarried linguist, to be played by Nicole Kidman.

To research it, Campion hung out in strip clubs and talked with macho cops and young men from Harlem in an effort to understand their world.

“It’s possibly the most frightening, alarming and erotic piece of literature I’ve read in a long time,” says Campion, explaining her attraction to the novel. “I was actually shocked, frightened by the end of it, really alarmed. I mean horrified.”

The book has an ending that is completely unexpected. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the suggestion that the female protagonist might be seeking her own death.

Originally, Campion and Kidman, with whom she worked in “Portrait of a Lady,” only planned to produce the movie.

“As we started to develop it we both became more and more attached and we just couldn’t let it go to anybody else,” Campion says. Her decision to direct it herself was helped along by Moore’s lack of resistance to changing the material “in a way that we did feel good about it,” Campion says. “Susanna doesn’t want the heroine to appear to be wanting her own death.”

The fact that it is a thriller, with all of the genre’s rules and conventions, was part of the attraction, says Campion, who thinks her sensibility will bring something fresh to the form.

Campion studied anthropology in college and relishes the opportunity to play field anthropologist while researching her films. “I think I’ve always been one, ever since I opened my eyes really.

“When I was little I went to my friends’ houses and checked out their whole routine for the day,” she says. “There’s nothing I like to hear better than what someone does from the moment they wake up to when they go to bed, you know. Like how they wake up, what they had for breakfast. . . . I love to hear that. From anyone.

“When I was little, I always got in trouble for looking too hard, for staring too much. I wouldn’t even realize I was studying.”