Since her astonishing debut in Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Kate Winslet has specialized in playing naive ingenues whose untempered romantic passion threatens to unravel them. There's very little difference between her Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet and her Rose in Titanic, except that one succumbs to madness and the other to heavy dollops of sentiment. Though she's as free-spirited as ever in the modest but deeply affecting Hideous Kinky, Winslet's character here is saddled by the burdens of adult responsibility. She stars as a single mother toting her precocious daughters (Bella Riza and Carrie Mullan) through the streets of Marrakesh, Morroco, in 1972; still driven by hippie idealism, she's fled the comforts of upper-middle-class London in a quest for self-actualization. While she dabbles in Sufi spiritualism and an on-again, off-again romance with an itinerant laborer (Hate's Said Taghmaoui), her self-absorption takes its toll on her children, who don't always take well to their nomadic lifestyle. Working from an autobiographical novel by Esther Freud (Sigmund's granddaughter), Scottish director Gillies MacKinnon's (Regeneration) feverish, elliptical storytelling captures Winslet's disorientation without losing emotional coherence. Hideous Kinky has more than a little in common with the overrated A Walk On The Moon, but the key difference between the two films is that MacKinnon respects the young mother's underlying convictions and never reduces her adventures to a flighty experiment in the counterculture. For Winslet, Hideous Kinky marks a fine transition into maturity, but it's especially encouraging that she's chosen to assert herself as a serious actress at a point when her career could have easily derailed into hotel-trashing overindulgence.