The Curious Case of Philip Larkin and Holy Smoke

Wherefore art thou, poet?

Ruth (Kate Winslet) becomes entwined in a bizarre psychosexual game with P. J. (Harvey Keitel) in Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (Miramax, 1998).

Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke has haunted me for years.

Somewhere in my internet travels during the last few years, I found a tidbit of information which stated that Philip Larkin’s poetry was somehow involved with the film.

I’d seen it many years before. I even make reference to it in an early draft of an essay that was later published in the Rappahannock Review in which an old flame falls in love with Eastern religion and is never heard from again. I’m something of a Kate Winslet completionist, and so a bizarre and visually hallucinatory late-90s flick featuring a young and fresh-faced Winslet as Ruth, a spiritual seeker from Sans Souci, Sydney, Australia, who finds herself wrapped up in a cult was irresistible to me in my youth. A pitch-perfect Harvey Keitel plays P. J. Waters, an American “exit counselor” Ruth’s family hires to deprogram her. The fact that Larkin’s work was featured in the film was new to me, but I was excited to revisit it.

So imagine my dismay when I rewatched the entire film—in all of its uncomfortable racial politics, cultural appropriation, and Alanis Morrisette-blaring conflagration—and found not one word of Philip Larkin.

Not one. Where did this line in my notes come from, then?

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