Gertrude Bell was an adventurer, desert explorer, cartographer, polyglot, writer, kingmaker, and an overshadowed figure during World War I. She spoke Arabic, German, French and several other languages; T.E. Lawrence sought her advice; the Arabs respected her; the British Empire wanted her to spy for them; she helped Sheikh Faisal, who fought with Lawrence against the Ottomans, become the king of Iraq. In short, a great woman who lived a full life. And now in the motion picture Queen Of The Desert, Bell is played by Nicole Kidman in her wind-kissed scarf, lovelorn smile and in a story fraught with Oriental romanticism. The great adventurer doesn't receive a great cinematic treatment after all.
Nicole Kidman in a scene from Queen Of The Desert.
This biopic was directed by the highly respected Werner Herzog, the master of fact-packed narrative and documentary-style austerity. This is not one of those works, and far from any of his best: Queen Of The Desert is a decidedly old-fashioned historical romance set against the Arabian sand dunes and plush colonial outposts, a flimsy, soupy glorification of an inspirational woman.
In this interpretation, Bell's wanderlust into Mesopotamia is driven by her free-spiritedness, yes, but also largely by her incurable heartache caused by Henry Cadogan -- it doesn't help that he's played, with hangdog weariness, by James Franco. They meet at the British consulate in Tehran. He reads her the sweetest Persian sonnets and takes her on a romantic camel ride across the sun-scorched landscape, only for Bell's aristocratic father to forbid her to marry him because he's a gambler. Heartbroken, she sets out on years of desert trekking, winning the trust of the most fearsome Druze and Bedouin tribes, all the while wearing on her sleeves the wounded grief of unrequited love.
This is no female version of Lawrence Of Arabia (though Lawrence makes an appearance in the form of, err, Robert Pattinson, another bad choice especially in the Bedouin garb). The film doesn't have the epic sweep of David Lean's masterpiece, and the romantic despair bogs down the feminist jolt when we see Bell stand up to those men in the macho Arab world. So atypical of Herzog's solid style, Queen Of The Desert feels almost woozy, since the hard-edged adventure of Bell is rendered in an inappropriate soft focus. Unless, of course, you're here just to see Kidman perched atop a braying camel while riding into the Arabian sunset. At least the view is beautiful.
