Independent Films, Film Profiles

Hideous Kinky (film)
by Gillies MacKinnon

Hideous Kinky is a 1998 film based on the novel, about a young English mother (Kate Winslet) who moves from London to Morocco with her two young daughters. It was directed by Gillies MacKinnon. The soundtrack was by the Incredible String Band. The film was marketed with the tagline "It's not just an adventure... It's a love affair."In 1972, disenchanted about the dreary conventions of English life, 25-year-old Julia heads for Morocco with her daughters, six-year-old Lucy and precocious eight-year-old Bea. Living at a low-rent Marrakech hotel, the trio survives on the sale of hand-sewn dolls and a few cheques from the girls' father, a London poet who also has a child from another woman.After the girls match their mother with gentle Moroccan acrobat and conman Bilal, sexual gears are set in motion, and he moves in, serving as a surrogate father. Julia's friend Eva urges Julia to study in Algers with a revered Sufi master as a school of "the annihilation of the ego", and in another sequence, European dandy Santoni invites Julia and the girls to his villa. As finance dwindles, Bilal's philosophy is "God will provide", although usually it is Bilal himself who provides. In the film's ending, Julia and the girls take a train to head back to London after Bea contracts a streptococcus infection.