SIFTING THE '60S THROUGH THE BLUR OF THE '90S

NEW YORK---A whiff of incense mixed with marijuana smoke drifts
through two new movies, "Hideous Kinky" and "A Walk on the Moon," both
of which conjure an era that Hollywood, in its devotion to snugly
happy endings, has largely avoided.

In the countercultural dream that has so intimidated Hollywood, a
hippie Pied Piper with stringy shoulder-length hair, a fringed jacket
and reeking of patchouli oil is banging a tambourine on his knee with
one hand and flashing a peace sign with the other. Beside him are a
trio of spaced-out go-go girls shimmying and gazing groggily into the
purple haze.

Although that signature scent, blown across three decades of shifting
winds, isn't overpowering in these films, it is just pungent enough to
suggest that what we think of as "the '60s"---the years (1964-72)
bracketed musically by Beatlemania and "American Pie"---were not a
hallucination but a messy, uncomfortable reality.

In their hesitantly nostalgic ways, both films remind us that in the
days of turning on, tuning in and dropping out, people actually
followed Timothy Leary's notorious prescription for personal
enlightenment.

But in remaining true to Hollywood 's tidy, late-'9Os formulas, they
also suggest that dropping back in was just as easy and that all that
dope smoking, acid tripping, searching, protesting and free love was
an adolescent prank, a temporary lapse of judgment.

Both films focus on young, attractive women who break the rules to
pursue sexual and spiritual transcendence, then return to the
middle-class lives they renounced. In the smart, beautifully acted
"Hideous Kinky," set in Morocco in 1972, Kate Winslet is Julia, a
young Englishwoman drifting around North Africa with two young
daughters in tow and no money.

In Marrakech she meets a Moroccan street acrobat, Said Taghmaoui, who
is also penniless. The two make love, smoke hashish and drag the girls
along on a risky trek into the countryside. Now and then, Julia, who
aspires to learn Sufi dancing, makes noises about wanting to
experience pure joy by obliterating her ego.

In reimagining an era of hippies, dropouts and seekers after a higher
consciousness, " Hideous Kinky" is accurate as far as it goes. But
that isn't very far. The movie conveys only the flavor of the time.
Julia's quest is portrayed as muddled and vague, and the movie nudges
us again and again to recognize what a terrible, irresponsible parent
she is.

When one daughter insists she wants to return to England and have a
proper education, her mother is dumbfounded. True Julia radiates a
certain defiant charm. But in the film's overall judgment, she is also
a silly spaced-out fool who must come to her senses. And in the end
she does.

"A Walk on the Moon" follows Pearl Kantrowitz, played by Diane Lane,
to a working-class Jewish resort in the Catskills in the summer of
1969. Pearl, who married her husband, Marty (Liev Schreiber), when she
became pregnant at 17, is now the mother of a 14-year-old daughter,
Alison (Anna Paquin), who is just entering adolescence. On weekdays,
while Marty is back in New York City repairing televisions, Pearl
plunges into an affair with Walker (Viggo Mortensen), a smolderingly
handsome peddler of blouses that he sells to the summer colony out of
his van.

Pearl momentarily loses her head and slips off with Walker to the
nearby Woodstock festival, where her daughter witnesses her
body-painted and ecstatic, being whirled in her lover's arms. Alison
is understandably upset. When Pearl finally has to choose between
Marty and Walker, the small, finely acted film caves in to '90s movie
values.

Had " A Walk on the Moon " been made in the '70s, there is little
doubt that the character would have forsaken her family to go on the
road with her sexual savior. Today, that is not permitted.

In what they show and don't show of the '60s, both films raise
disturbing questions: When did it become embarrassing for the mass
media to portray the counterculture as a movement driven by passionate
idealism and a reckless insistence on crashing through barriers? Could
it be that the movies are too scared of the era and the freedoms it
represented to confront it head-on?

Every now and then, Hollywood has tried. "Easy Rider," which came out
of left field in 1969 and was made for a dime, proved to be a fluke.
While other films of the period, "Midnight Cowboy" and "Five Easy
Pieces,'' for example, and later, "Shampoo" and "Coming Home,"
expressed a combative, rebellious spirit, they didn't dive in to the
thick of things.

And Hollywood was very late in addressing the Vietnam War. It had to
be safely behind us before we could begin to watch movies about it.

As much as the counterculture was mobilized by antiwar sentiment, its
driving force was really drugs, and not only psychedelics. In the
quest to "break on through to the other side," as Jim Morrison
bellowed, any and every stimulant was enlisted for the cause.

Amphetamines, which were widely available back then and carried little
stigma contributed immeasurably to the collective paranoia that was
rapidly building up. And of course, there was always booze to smooth
the transitions.

Were what we call the '60s a mass psychosis that is either best
forgotten or swept under the rug? I don't think so. For all the
smashed lives and insanity that such excesses brought the root of that
frenzied exploration still strikes me as an honest, if naive, effort
to improve the human condition by storming the barricades of
consciousness. That idealism is distilled in the best music of the
era, which combines a majestic rage with an exhilarating eroticism.

Today's social climate is in many ways antithetical to that of 30
years ago when the notion of capitalism itself was under siege. The
power of today's American economy combined with the country's
conservative, conformist values, make joining the system irresistible
to all but a few. Rebellion is reduced to a matter of fashion statement.

If the AIDS epidemic ended the sexual revolution, sexual allure has
increasingly become the major marketing tool fueling the economy. Rock
may have been superseded by rap, but the history of rock and roll is
probably the one with which more Americans are familiar than any
other. As for drugs, the new miracle elixirs, Prozac and the other
serotonin boosters are tools to help people become happier, more
efficient producers in the great American money machine.

Movies may never get the '60s right. For one thing, those days are
fading fast, and many of the Hollywood stud-lo executives calling the
shots are Wunderkinds in their 20s and 30s whose closest contact with
the '60s are VH1 flashbacks or their parents' (censored) anecdotes.

In his sweetly prescient '60s ballad, "Younger Generation," John
Sebastian, a quintessential Woodstock-era songwriter, contemplated
impending fatherhood and the raising of an adolescent son: "And then
I'll know that all I've learned my kid assumes/And all my deepest
worries must be his cartoons."