Holy Smoke begins with Neil Diamond singing “Holly Holy” as Ruth Barron enters India and experiences spiritual revelation with the force of romantic infatuation. The song is enormous, ecstatic and almost embarrassingly sincere, carrying handclaps, choir and Diamond’s preacherly voice into a sequence filled with saturated color and opened perception. Jane Campion does not use it simply to mock Ruth’s conversion. The scene understands why surrender might feel wonderful. Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack spends the rest of the film examining that dangerous pleasure: the longing to escape an incomplete identity by placing faith in somebody who claims to know what the self should become.
Campion’s film follows Ruth from an Indian ashram back to Australia, where her alarmed family hires American “exit counselor” P.J. Waters to free her from the influence of a guru called Baba. P.J. isolates Ruth inside a remote desert cabin and attempts to dismantle her beliefs over three days. What begins as professional deprogramming becomes sexual and psychological combat. Ruth attacks P.J.’s masculinity; P.J. exposes the borrowed pieces of her spiritual identity. Each believes the other is trapped inside an illusion, yet neither can maintain a secure position from which to perform the rescue.
Badalamenti scores that struggle without assigning enlightenment to one character and delusion to the other. “Betrayal of Ruth” introduces the central theme through guitar, flute and restrained orchestral color. The melody is tender enough to suggest sympathy, but its downward movement carries disappointment and emotional displacement. Ruth has been betrayed by her family, who lure her home with a story about her father dying. Yet the title also leaves open the possibility that Ruth has betrayed herself by exchanging uncertainty for a ready-made spiritual identity.
The theme avoids the sinister vocabulary normally used for films about cults. There are no ominous chants warning that Baba controls an army of blank-eyed followers. Badalamenti treats Ruth’s spiritual longing seriously even when the film mocks its expression. The music recognizes that her Indian experience answered a genuine hunger. The problem is not that she wanted transcendence. It is that transcendence arrived attached to hierarchy, fantasy and another charismatic man.
“Love Journey” expands the theme into warmer strings, allowing the film’s spiritual and erotic impulses to occupy the same music. Ruth’s devotion to Baba, P.J.’s confidence in his methods and the attraction developing between them are all variations upon surrender. The characters want to believe they remain in control, but Badalamenti’s melody keeps opening beneath their arguments. Thought may organize the situation, but desire is quietly determining where everyone stands.
“Moonrise” brings stillness to the Australian landscape. The desert is physically open, yet the isolation cabin becomes increasingly claustrophobic. Badalamenti uses spacious orchestration to sharpen that contradiction. Flute and strings suggest distance, but the music does not offer freedom. The horizon surrounds Ruth and P.J. with emptiness, removing every ordinary social distraction until their performances become impossible to maintain.
The score becomes playful whenever their contest slips into theater. “Kiss All Around It” moves with a crooked tango-like elegance, treating seduction as choreography between two people continually reversing roles. P.J. enters the cabin as expert, authority and father figure. Ruth gradually turns his methods against him, exposing the insecurity beneath the expensive boots, black clothing and professional certainty. Badalamenti’s rhythm understands that neither person is simply predator or victim. They circle, approach and retreat while control passes between them.
“Waiting, Reaching, Seeking” carries the score’s most recognizable Badalamenti quality: a short motif repeated within melancholy space until longing becomes almost physical. The title could describe Ruth, P.J. or everyone in Ruth’s family. Each character reaches toward some external confirmation that life possesses meaning. Ruth seeks it through Baba. P.J. seeks it through mastery over Ruth. Her family seeks it through returning her to familiar behavior. The music does not resolve their seeking because the film distrusts anyone selling permanent resolution.
“Waltz in the Desert” turns the cabin into a ballroom with no audience. A waltz organizes two bodies through repeated rotation, allowing them to travel while continuously returning to the same relationship. Ruth and P.J. behave similarly. Their arguments move from spirituality to sexuality, gender, age and power, but every subject brings them back to one question: who has the authority to define the other?
Badalamenti’s waltz retains elegance while introducing slight instability. The dance is beautiful, but its structure is coercive. One partner leads and the other follows, even when the movement appears shared. Holy Smoke repeatedly rearranges that hierarchy. P.J. believes he leads because his method has been professionally codified. Ruth discovers that sexual humiliation can reduce his authority faster than rational debate. Both mistake temporary dominance for truth.
“Snappy Lipstick” enters with piano, banjo, whistling and brisk comic rhythm, giving the family sections a cracked Australian buoyancy. Ruth’s relatives are not presented as a dignified support system confronting a dangerous cult. They are loud, vain, confused and capable of astonishing selfishness. Their intervention is motivated by love, embarrassment and panic in roughly equal proportions. The cue lets their absurdity breathe without reducing them to harmless cartoons.
“Hallucination” returns to the main melody through solo violin, making spiritual vision sound lonely rather than triumphant. P.J.’s certainty begins collapsing, and Ruth becomes less an assignment than an overwhelming projection. The expert who arrived to dismantle another person’s fantasy starts constructing his own. He imagines himself as lover, rescuer and transformed man, failing to recognize that his feelings may be another form of possession.
The soundtrack’s three borrowed songs enlarge this conflict. The Angels’ version of “I Put a Spell on You” states openly what the score usually implies. Everyone in Holy Smoke believes somebody else has cast the spell. Ruth’s family blames Baba. P.J. believes Ruth has seduced and emasculated him. Ruth sees P.J.’s professional language as another system of control. The song’s blunt possessiveness strips spiritual authority down to its erotic skeleton.
Annie Lennox’s “Primitive” gives desire a deeper bodily voice. Its sensuality is polished but unsettled, matching a film in which sophisticated argument repeatedly collapses into need, shame and physical exposure. Campion places intellect and instinct in continuous friction, refusing the comforting belief that educated people have escaped primitive impulses. P.J.’s expertise does not protect him from vanity; Ruth’s spiritual language does not prevent cruelty.
“The Celebration” and the closing “Maya, Mayi, Ma” provide the score’s most openly communal material. Percussion, voices and repeated melodic figures create an intoxicating ceremony whose energy differs sharply from the lonely themes associated with Ruth and P.J. The music can sound joyful without confirming the truth of any doctrine. Participation itself produces meaning. Rhythm joins bodies before belief has been explained.
“Maya, Mayi, Ma” stretches that idea across nearly seven minutes. Maya can refer to illusion, the veil through which reality is misperceived, but Badalamenti does not make illusion sound worthless. Human beings live through symbols, songs, clothing, roles and stories. The danger begins when one symbol claims to be the final reality and one person claims exclusive power to interpret it.
“Montage Finale” brings the themes together after both characters have been stripped of their most flattering identities. P.J. has lost professional command, masculine dignity and the fantasy that Ruth needs him. Ruth has lost the absolute confidence that Baba supplied, but not her capacity for spiritual curiosity. Their encounter does not end with one worldview defeating the other. It leaves both people embarrassed, wounded and less certain.
That uncertainty gives Holy Smoke its unusual musical character. Badalamenti’s score can be mystical, comic, romantic and melancholy without allowing any tone to become the film’s final truth. Neil Diamond’s ecstatic opening is not exposed as a simple lie. The desert waltz is not merely parody. The lonely violin does not prove P.J.’s love is pure. Every piece offers an emotional reality while leaving its interpretation unstable.
The soundtrack ultimately treats belief and desire as neighboring forces. Both can open perception, create courage and reorganize a life. Both can also become instruments of submission. Badalamenti does not solve that contradiction. He gives it melodies, rhythms and ceremonies, then allows them to change meaning as power moves between Ruth and P.J. The holy smoke may rise from genuine fire or from another illusion burning away. Either way, everybody inhales it.
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