Hideous Kinky (film)

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Hideous Kinky
Hideous Kinky film poster
Directed by	Gillies MacKinnon
Produced by	Ann Scott
Written by	Esther Freud (novel) Billy MacKinnon (screenplay)
Starring	Kate Winslet Saïd Taghmaoui Carrie Mullan Bella Riza
Music by	John E. Keane
Cinematography	John de Borman
Editing by	Pia Di Ciaula
Distributed by	Columbia Pictures
Release date(s)	October 2, 1998
Running time	98 min.
Language	English, French, Arabic
Budget	$12,000,000 (estimated)
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IMDb profile

This article is about the 1998 film. For the 1992 novel on which its based, see Hideous Kinky.

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."

[edit] Plot summary

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.