Meandering in Morocco
After catching the father of her two children with another woman, Julia (Kate Winslet) packs her things up and with her young children Bea (Bella Riza) and Lucy (Carrie Mullan) heads to Morocco in search of adventure and enlightenment. It is there that she meets Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui) who ends up travelling with them and looking out for Bea and Lucy who yearn for some sort of normality to their lives. But Julia's desire to do her thing ends up putting her daughters in danger.
I have never felt any sort of desire to just pack up my things and head to a foreign county to go travelling or to see the world and that is probably why "Hideous Kinky" did so little for me. I just couldn't connect to the characters and understand what it was that Julia was seeking other than an experience be it with the good hearted Bilal or trying to make ends meet when they have no money. And you see that appears to be what the movie is about, the experiences of this mother and her daughters as they travel face difficulties and so on, whilst Julia's irresponsibility makes her a danger.
What that means is that for someone who found "Hideous Kinky" a dull movie from a plot point of view it becomes a visual movie with Gillies MacKinnon serving up many beautiful views of the landscape. And there are plenty of scenes of Kate Winslet looking stunning with the sun illuminating her hair as well as what seemed an obligatory scenes for Winslet to appear topless which at one point she seemed to do in so many movies.
What this all boils down to is that "Hideous Kinky" did nothing for me as a movie but I enjoyed the visual side of it. I am sure for those who have travelled to Morocco and yearn for a life of experience it is a far more riveting movie but without that yearning it is hard work.
