General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Hideous Kinky

Hideous Kinky is a 1998 drama film directed by Gillies MacKinnon, adapted from Esther Freud's 1992 semi-autobiographical novel of the same title, about a young English mother who leaves London with her two small daughters for Marrakech in the early 1970s¹^•². It stars Kate Winslet as Julia, with Saïd Taghmaoui as the street performer Bilal, Bella Riza as the older daughter Bea, and Carrie Mullan as the younger daughter Lucy¹. The film was a British-French co-production presented by the Film Consortium and BBC Films in association with the Arts Council of England, produced by Ann Scott from a screenplay by Billy MacKinnon¹^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Source novel	Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud, her fiction debut, published April 1, 1992 by Harcourt, 224 pages⁴
Film credits	Directed by Gillies MacKinnon; screenplay by Billy MacKinnon; produced by Ann Scott; 1998, United Kingdom and France¹
Principal cast	Kate Winslet (Julia), Saïd Taghmaoui (Bilal), Bella Riza (Bea), Carrie Mullan (Lucy), Pierre Clémenti (Santoni)¹^•⁵
Setting	Early 1970s Marrakech, Morocco, chiefly the medina⁶^•⁷
Running time	Reported as 97 minutes by the BFI, 98 minutes by the British Council and US distributor, and 99 minutes by Time Out¹^•⁶^•²
Censorship	Passed '15' by the BBFC for infrequent strong language (cinema, 25 August 1998); rated R in the United States for language and some sexuality⁸^•⁵
Reception	67% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 52 reviews; won Best Artistic Achievement at the Evening Standard British Film Awards⁵^•³

Spoilers

Story

The story follows Julia, a young single mother disenchanted with life in London, who travels to Morocco with her daughters Lucy and Bea in search of peace, love, and spiritual fulfillment⁶. Julia is loving but distracted by money worries, and the family lives hand to mouth in Marrakech⁶. The children are matchmakers: they pair their mother with Bilal, a gentle Moroccan acrobat and con man who becomes her lover and a surrogate father to the girls⁹. A second father figure appears in Santoni, a dapper European played by Pierre Clémenti⁵.

The film is told through the eyes of the youngest girl, Lucy¹⁰. As the stresses of the family's way of life grow beyond what the children can bear, Bilal makes a sacrifice on their behalf to raise money for their tickets home, and Julia must finally choose between her lover and her children⁶. Julia also travels to Algeria in pursuit of Sufi wisdom, a quest the daughters view with mixed feelings².

The title

The title has no literal meaning in the story. In the novel, "hideous" and "kinky" are the only words ever spoken by the mentally and physically declining wife of one of the mother's boyfriends; unaware of the woman's suffering, the narrator and her sister Bea turn the phrase into a magic word in a game of tag⁴. In the film, the two girls chant the phrase around Morocco for the thrill of shouting words the locals do not understand¹¹. Freud has said that to her and her sister, the words together denoted "anything beautiful, absurd or frightening"¹².

The novel and its author

Esther Freud, a London-born actress, published Hideous Kinky in 1992 as her first novel⁴. She is the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and the great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud¹³. The book draws directly on her own childhood: she was taken to Morocco as a girl by her hippie mother, and the family spent 18 months there¹³^•¹⁴.

Freud began the book at 24, on an Arvon creative writing course, with 40 pages of a structurally complicated draft full of flashbacks and jumps in location¹⁴. The advice she received was to tell the story from beginning to end, and she wrote the first chapter in an old summer house before discipline and a period out of work let her finish it¹⁴. In a later Guardian book club discussion, she said that almost everything in the novel was remembered, and that it was the child-like manner of narration that had to be contrived; the autobiographical content made some reactions to the book, including criticism of the mother's behavior, feel "hurtful" to her mother¹⁵.

The novel's narrator is a young child whose age is left uncertain: late in the book she says "I could only count to four which was how old I was", and she has her birthday just before the novel ends, so she is presumably five, though she never says so¹⁶. Kirkus praised the book chiefly as travelogue, "a fluently written inside view of Morocco", while noting that the narrative seemed too detailed and logical to come from a five-year-old⁴.

Adaptation and production

The screenplay was written by Billy MacKinnon, the director's brother, working from Freud's novel¹^•⁹. The film was shot entirely on location in Morocco¹¹, with John de Borman as director of photography⁶. The soundtrack draws on memorable hits from the British charts of the 1960s and 1970s⁹.

The adaptation follows the novel's preference for incident over plot, and it changes the point of view: where the book filters everything through the child narrator, the film switches perspective to Julia, who explains the move with the line "We can be poor and cold in London, or poor and warm in Morocco"¹²^•¹⁷. The daughters' ages also shift between tellings: the US distributor's synopsis gives seven and five, while other accounts give eight and six¹⁰^•⁹.

Reception

Critics responded to the film's texture and performances rather than its narrative drive. Time Out called it "extremely clear eyed", an unsentimental, evocative portrait of both Moroccan and middle-class hippy culture that never takes sides for or against the mother, and praised MacKinnon for drawing terrific performances from the cast, with Winslet "bravely refusing to court our sympathies"². Variety wrote that Winslet "continues an uninterrupted line of fine performances with the modest yet affecting Hideous Kinky"⁵. The Independent was less convinced, asking "where's the movie?" and arguing that the film lost the novel's formal conceit of a child narrator, through whose vantage the mother's feckless indulgence could be felt as genuine confusion and resentment¹⁷.

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 67% Tomatometer from 52 reviews and a 60% audience score⁵. It won Best Artistic Achievement at the Evening Standard British Film Awards³. A reviewer for Friends of Morocco, judging the period detail against his own service in Morocco in the late 1960s, called the production's period accuracy "dead on"⁷.

Release and classification

The film was classified '15' by the British Board of Film Classification on 25 August 1998 for its cinema release, distributed by U.I.P. (UK), with the consumer advice "contains strong language, moderate sexualised nudity and soft drug use"⁸. It opened in UK cinemas on 5 February 1999¹⁸. In the United States it was distributed by Stratosphere Entertainment with an R rating, with a wide theatrical release listed as April 26, 1998⁵. It later reached DVD in the UK on 29 April 2002¹⁸.

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1990s › Drama films late 1990s › Released 1995 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?