text: I actually saw this movie at a cinema. At the time, I was working shifts and went there during a matinée on a hot summer day when I couldn't sleep. The cinema was air-conditioned.<br /><br />It was an early multi-screen complex and I somehow got into the wrong venue. I had intended to doze through something else. But as things transpired, there would be no sleeping. Shortly after the wrong movie began, I was additionally disconcerted by a group of female cleaners who came in and used it as their social club. I was the only other person there, and it is a measure of the movie's appeal that they habitually expected the place to be empty and asked me if I minded their presence. I didn't.<br /><br />Within about half an hour, the cleaners' conversation proved to be more interesting than the entertainment I had paid for.<br /><br />This movie oozed out of the screen with the cheesiness of very stale mayonnaise. The kind that has little dark, hairy, tufts growing on the surface. I particularly remember my senses being assaulted by strident cords of music that would blare out with very little warning, and even less meaning. The cleaners provided an anticipatory cue by putting their fingers in their ears.<br /><br />It was about some city bird going to live in the sticks amongst a load a backwood folk, putting them straight but at the same time being taught a moral lesson or two herself. Like you do. A sort of 'journey of discovery'. There was a sententious smugness about the whole production. In particular, the leading actress had an irritating habit of staring at every hick with a kind of intense beatific compassion, as if she herself were the patron-saint of thickies.<br /><br />And I believe at some stage she wrote a book.<br /><br />Long before the end, I had become fascinated by one of the cleaner's hushed and breathy tails of sexual impropriety.<br /><br />One suspects that there are some to whom sitting quietly for a couple of hours and not having to think, constitutes a meditation. The best that I can say is that I would not want to share their salad.<br /><br />I have never seen this movie advertised as showing on television, which surprises me. It is just the sort of pap that is screened in the afternoon to punish the unemployed for not having jobs.<br /><br />If you ever work shifts, be sure to get into the right theatre. Or hope for some cleaning ladies.