The point of departure is truly inspired: a young Australian woman's religious conversion while on holiday in India, and the scandalized reactions of her middle-class suburban family back home, the most severe of which is to enlist the help of a recommended deprogrammer: "The number-one exit counselor in America." The first section of the movie -- the initial clash and contrast of cultures -- elicits many a fine laugh. The wonderful shock cut, for example, from the swarming dusty streets of Delhi to the high overhead view of the red-brick, red-rooftile housing development, all neat and tidy, in the outskirts of Sydney. Or the entire episode of the young woman's stodgy mother trekking to India in person, a kerchief pressed firmly over her nose ("Is it a toilet or a hole here?"), to appeal to her daughter to come home. (The ruse of her dying father won't move the new convert: "Maybe next time. In another life.") Equal parts funny, exasperating, suffocating, and frightening, and all the funnier for the added ingredients, is the general spectacle of everyone knowing better than the heroine herself what's good for her, and everyone at the same time undermining their air of certainty through the dismal mundanity of their own lives. It was a key creative decision, a fateful decision, to exempt the religious sect from all critical (or comical) scrutiny -- with the result that the slant of the movie is entirely toward Westerners and their spiritual aridness, Western culture and its paucity of answers. The slantedness -- the lopsidedness -- the imbalance -- causes the movie eventually to go off the rails: the concern with spirituality gets diverted into a concern with sexual politics, as well as a concern with actual sex. But the movie is never less than provocative, first in a good way, a stimulating, a challenging way, and then in a not so good way, an aggravating way. With Kate Winslet, Harvey Keitel, Pam Grier; directed by Jane Campion. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd