Werner herzog's queen of the desert is a resplendent, poetic masterpiece. Nicole Kidman delivers a career defining performance.
- frem for (FX ...) anmeldelsen i The Guardian ved Peter Bradshaw:
Here is the kind of film that you can hardly believe is the work of Werner Herzog
who has written and directed it. It is grown-up, respectable and
historical, perfectly competently made, lots of accents and period
dressing-up … and just the tiniest bit dull.
Queen of the Desert is an expansive and solemn biopic of Gertrude Bell, played by Nicole Kidman
as a cousin to the doughty Englishwoman-abroad role she had in Baz
Luhrmann’s Australia. Bell was the British traveller, scholar and
orientalist of the early 20th century who, like TE Lawrence, took a
patrician interest in the Arab peoples who were yearning to throw off
the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. She made a remarkable contribution to
creating the kingdoms and nation states of what is now known as the
Middle East. The sheikhs were perhaps intended to be the equivalent of
British India’s complaisant maharajahs. That was before oil was
discovered.
Headstrong, beautiful Bell is at first described in highly abusive and ungallant terms by the British army types who resent her interference in diplomatic affairs. But Herzog soon shows us that her beauty is unconventional only in that she is tall. Nicole Kidman makes some of the other characters look as small as Hobbits. Bored to tears on the family estate, Gertrude persuades her papa to send her out to foreign climes and here her beauty and brilliance capture the heart of raffish junior British diplomat Henry Cadogan, played by James Franco. This actor certainly puts the “cad” in Cadogan, but his very odd English accent and cheesy ingratiating grin makes him look and sound like some lost member of the Monkees. Bell’s father does not approve of this man and the liaison does not end well.
Perhaps in flight from her internal emotional turmoil, Bell cultivates her passionate interest in the Bedouin tribesmen and displaces her need for romantic love outwards – into the desert. There she is to encounter Lawrence himself, played boyishly by Robert Pattinson. He looks a little self-conscious in the headdress – though perhaps no more self-conscious than Lawrence himself looked in it. His appearance got a few laughs from the Berlin festival audience, but Pattinson carried off this (minor) role well enough.
She also meets another Englishman, Charles Doughty-Wylie, played by Damian Lewis, who at first appears to be just another blithering British officer who is infuriated by Bell’s impetuous expeditions into difficult areas, ostensibly because she is upsetting the apple-cart, but really because they realise that this civilian has the imagination and flair which is showing them up. But soon Wylie is entranced by Bell’s beauty and his marriage is under strain.
And so the movie plods on. Bell journeys out into that magnificent landscape, comes back, goes out, comes back. Her courage commands the respect of the tribesmen for whom she becomes the uncrowned “queen of the desert”. But Bell does not seem to grow up or become different in any appreciable way in the course of this longish film. Everything is pretty buttoned-up. As for Kidman herself, she does a perfectly reasonable job with this difficult role and she is well cast. But she never cuts loose, never unleashes the kind of rage, or love, or despair that you sense is simmering inside.
