(1999; English with Arabic and French without subtitled translations) At Christmas in 1972 after arriving about a year earlier in Marrakech, to where hippies and others have come to escape the poisonous modern world, 25-year-old British, idealistic ex-pat Julia (Kate Winslet) with her two daughters - Bea (Bella Riza) and Lucy (Carrie Mullan), who are seven or eight and five or six, respectively - opens a package from her famous-poet husband (whom she left rather than share) in London, only to discover he's mixed up gifts.

Selling cloth dolls in the marketplace, she's dependent (her parents are deceased) on his cheques for rent and food; when the money no longer arrives on time, Bea says: "He's forgotten about us, hasn't he?" Wanting to be normal and to begin school, Bea asks if they can return home, to which her mother replies: "London's cold and sad." Whereas African-hot Morocco has camels and scorpions.

Lucy imagines stories she shares with Bea; they play a game of tag, using the Arabic words for "hideous" and "kinky." A charismatic street acrobat, Bilal (Saïd Taghmaoui), becomes Julia's lover and a surrogate father to the girls; he disappears ("The world is made of shame") and reenters their lives throughout the story.

Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon's vagabond-like characters meander through Morocco in a beautifully photographed but largely plotless picture - from a screenplay by brother Billy MacKinnon based on Esther Freud's semi-autobiographical novel - roaming from Marrakech to Bilal's village (where an elder warns him: "to neglect a wife is a crime against God") to Agadir and back to Marrakech.

A Frenchman, Jean-Louis Santoni, familiar with her husband's writings, invites Julia and the girls to be guests in his friend's home where they become acquainted with Charlotte and Ben Said (who actually owns the mansion). Charlotte, who regards Morocco as a "wretched country," strongly recommends Julia's returning to the UK; Ben speaks deprecatingly ("ancient frauds") of her desire to study at the Sufi school in Algiers.

Leaving behind Bea (at the girl's request so she can attend to her formal education), Julia and Lucy hitchhike - meeting another itinerant, a young man named Henning, and narrowly escaping death on a treacherous mountain road - to the Sufi school where she hopes to experience the "pure joy … blissful emptiness" of the annihilation of the Ego, as her friend Eva had urged her.

When mother and daughter return to Marrakech (with the girls' birthdays approaching), Santoni and Caroline have departed (having become disagreeable to Ben Said) and Bea is gone; she's found inside an orphanage where Patricia, the Christian director, protective of the child, presents an antagonistic attitude toward an irresponsible parent. Then Bea comes down with a streptococcus infection, necessitating medication Julia can't afford.

The movie ends with "You Don't Have to Cry" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash (one of several tunes in the soundtrack evocative of the late '60s and early '70s), though the trio's "Marrakesh Express" - "Looking at the world/ Through the sunset in your eyes/ Trying to make the train/ Through clear Moroccan skies" - would have been my choice.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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