In her first outing since Titanic, Winslet let her hair down to play the
heroine of Esther Freud's autobiographical kaftan-culture novel.
Directed with panache by Gillies Mackinnon, who seems more
comfortable with 1970s Morocco than the 1930s England of
Regeneration, this is a sun-soaked warning to The Beach generation.
Winslet plays a flower-power mother who, little more than a child
herself, settles in North Africa after her divorce. She captures both
the heady freedom and the desperate, lonely straits of the character,
and the film reflects these in the contrast between teeming, vivid
markets and terrifying nightmares.
