A young mother romps around Marrakesh with her two daughters. End of story. Do you know the feeling, when you look at a travel brochure for a place you've just brought tickets to? That kind of inflated expectation of change and scenery, which you'll be enjoying in a matter of time? Now imagine you're stuck inside that brochure, with nothing but the charmed scenery of the advertorial ideal, the rich cultural detail without depth of reality. And nothing but these colourfully perfect little vistas. No point of entry, no departure. And no previous reality to base judgment on. That is what the Kink is like, except I forgot to mention the hideously historical soundtrack, where it will for ever be the 70s.
Young mother escapes the materiality of England and hopes to find a very Sufi salvation in North Africa. Two little blossom daughters watch their mother's search. But the hapless viewer is not allowed the luxury of a contrastive explanation - like what are they leaving, or how they perceived the first arrival, that first contact with exotica, or the hangover when the drugs evaporated and the wild decision lay bare, or the crazy rip-offs and exploitations that awaited them at the dock, the first nasty taste of hard cultural difference. Anything - some reason, some contextual location to condition this whole romp through exotic settings. Something more than lowered jaws at the cinematographer's slide night of all the great locations he'd russled up over gins and quinine and wild stories of cheap, union free labour relations waited to be exploited by Mr European Filmmaker Sirrah. Because from a narrative point of view, the Kink is just a series of short points of scenery. With Kate Winslet.
Put simply, the narrative just flops around the place. It doesn't even fall into place. It's clearly an adaptation, but when it comes to settling on a central point of view, it's drastically unclear. First it's the mother's story, then the kids steal the show with their antics and confusions, and then Kate has a bit of a swing and her relation seems central again. I guess the point of all the scenery is to drive home the maternal relationship at the centre of the film, but it flops. As characters, the kids are excellent. Kate hasn't been fleshed out realistically enough; there are moments when she loses nearly everything and she doesn't fall into any real anguish or desperation, and neither does she seem robust and desperate to succeed. If she was pregnant with a third child, or a romance writer desperate for every penny, or simply a spiritual desperate, then the story would have some currency, or greater coin in a cycle of Marrakesh and landscape settings.
The Kink has a real want of context or connection with things, and always remains on the periphery of Kate and a real story. She prays, the kids ogle, we hear 70s pop. No carryover, no follow through. I'm making such a point of this because the script really needs jacking up. More balls in the narrative risk department. Give me a call Billy, because I can really help.
One plot salvation could have arisen in the attempt to suggest spiritual movement, even if only as some ultimate means or goal. The Sufi notion of ego destruction was really underplayed; it's a form of death which in the Sheltering Sky became a quasi-religious drive made conscious through narrative direction. But in Kinky the only religious affirmation is the strength of maternal bonding without agency. On the one hand, a men's club religion and a bunch of idiot hippies on the other doesn't leave Kate with much of a middle path to pursue. Cast adrift on endless middle ground, the film doesn't really resolve anything it just ends. With a little more psychology it could've been pushed in any number of directions, especially as a cause and effect story. And so when one has finished contemplating all the emphatic warnings of religious dissatisfaction rolled out by male characters, and the endless brochure of scenes, what else is there left to do but contemplate nipples?
rino breebaart
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