Queen of the Desert

Some years ago, I saw a picture called Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.  If I  recall correctly the movie was about a flamboyant transsexual traveling by bus through the Australian outback.  The movie was colorful, irritating, and contained beautiful shots of the desert.  I was surprised to see this film on Netflix, clicked on Queen of the Desert and encountered something equally colorful, irritating, and unlikely -- Werner Herzog's 2014 biopic of Gertrude Bell, the doughty female desert explorer, starring Nicole Kidman.  The film has been lavishly reviled, unjustly in my view.  It's a strange picture.  Of course, all of Herzog's movies are strange.  But this film is peculiar in ways that suggest Herzog should never have attempted this movie -- most of the picture goes against his grain and it's hard to know what to make of the resulting film.  An adjective that Herzog often uses in interviews is "fluffy" -- by this he means, "soft," "gentle", and even, "compromised."  Queen of the Desert vacillates between scenes undercut by silly, didactic dialogue and images of great beauty.  Much of it is fundamentally "fluffy" and it's hard to know what Herzog thought he was doing in some sequences.  Plotting has never been a strong point in Herzog films and his movies have rarely, if ever, featured showy or important parts for women.  Queen of the Desert plays as a kind of cross between the bodice-ripping romance of The English Patient and the wide-screen Orientalism of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.  Herzog has always been primarily a documentary director -- his fiction films generally purport to "ecstatic truth" and are remarkable in large part due to the rigors endured in making them.  Thus, Herzog harbors a powerful and intrinsically German streak of didacticism -- this aspect of his sensibility is also on display in the film's extended scenes involving historical exposition.

Queen of the Desert begins with a bunch of men dressed up as dignitaries discussing how the British intend to carve-up the Middle East.  The cigar-chomping Winston Churchill is on display as is T. E. Lawrence (Robert Pattinson) and a courtly, handsome Dudley-do-right sort of guy, Major Wylie.  (Wylie is played by Damien Lewis, best known to me as Axe from a "guilty pleasure", the Showtime series Billions -- here his perpetual sneer is masked by a moustache.)  The dialogue is wooden and nakedly expository -- someone suggests that the territories can't be divided without considering Gertrude Bell's discoveries.  This puts some of the men into a state of enraged apoplexy -- although, Major Wylie is soft-spoken and suggests that she knows better than all the ways of the desert folk.  After this baldly expository beginning, the film shows us Gertrude Bell as a debutante -- she dances with various men at a ball and finds them all ineffectual and dull. (Kidman who had to be in her forties when the film was made convincingly plays the ingénue role.) Gertrude prevails on her doting father to allow her to travel for adventure to the British embassy in Damascus.  There she meets a dashing military attaché played by James Franco at his most smarmy.  Franco's character teaches Gertrude Farsi and together they construe and translate Omar Khayyam -- "so this word means 'jug'?"  "Yes, this is 'jug' and this word means 'loaf"." So a jug of wine and a loaf of bread and 'you' -- what is that verb? 'singing'?"  Of course, translating these erotic verses leads to a torrid love affair.  Gertrude goes back to her country estate in England to plead with her father that she be allowed to marry James Franco's military attaché.  For some reason that seems unclear Gertrude's father refuses.  Franco pitches himself off a cliff at their trysting place, committing suicide in such a way as to send an unmistakable message to Gertrude that she has failed him.  Gertrude mourns extravagantly and considers herself "widowed."  She returns to Damascus where she encounter Major Wylie.  Wylie falls under her spell -- this is not surprising since she is fantastically beautiful, willowy, and towering.  Compared to the little beleaguered men in the movie, Nicole Kidman is a goddess and Herzog's camera is under her spell as well, often shooting her in pools of light that are expressionist and not realistically motivated -- she seems to absorb the light and folds of her alabaster white desert robes glow with mystical radiance.  Herzog's films often involve journeys across dangerous and exotic terrain and in the second half of the movie -- it's about two hours long -- he is working in a genre that he invented and in which he is comfortable.  The picture involves not one but two spectacular journeys across vast expanses of blowing sand -- this is a very windy movie.   First, Gertrude travels to the Druse sheikh with whom she discusses poetry -- she earns his trust and gives him a pair of expensive and beautiful dueling pistols that, for some reason, Major Wylie had given her back in Damascus.  She returns to Damascus where Wylie expresses his love -- but, unfortunately, he's still unhappily married.  Gertrude goes back into the desert, this time on a mission to determine whether Ibn Rashid or Ibn Saud will gain hegemony over the Bedouin tribes.  After many difficulties, she reaches Ibn Rashid's fortified city --  Rashid is in hiding and the town seems under the control of Fatima, a sinister Aunt.  Later, the young Emir arrives, a mere boy who seems to be about 16.  He demands her for his harem.  Imperiously, she notes that the prophet would never condone a man touching a married woman -- and she regards herself as married.  With regal dignity, she simply walks out of the prison-like labyrinth where she has been confined pending the boys arrival and returns to Damascus.  There, Wylie announces that he can't marry her (his wife would commit suicide) and has enlisted in a combat position -- it's 1915.  Predictably,  Wylie is killed in battle.  Gertrude sees Churchill and other military men posing for pictures at the pyramids -- Herzog lavishes scorn on Winston Churchill whom he regards as a feckless bully.  Gertrude travels into the desert a third time to meet with two young men inexplicably sitting in a tent in the wasteland with falcons on their wrists.  She prophecies that the young men will be kings and, then, rides alone into the infinitely vast and featureless desert.  Several closing titles tell us that the two young men later became the kings of Jordan and Syria.  Ibn Saud consolidated the desert tribes under his rule.  And Gertrude Bell, a title says, "delineated" the boundaries of the countries in the present Middle East.

It's hard to know how we should interpret this ending.  Obviously, the British-imposed boundaries "delineating" the Middle East have proven to be catastrophic -- are we supposed to blame Gertrude Bell for 9 - 11 or the various wars between Iraq, Iran, the Kurds, and the USA?  Are we supposed to blame her for the Druse militia and the collapse of Syria?  Most scholars believe that the arbitrary assignment of nation-state boundaries upon heterogenous groups of people who never really liked one another has caused enormous turbulence and instability in the Middle East.  (The film is curiously silent about Palestine.)  Most of the film is very conventional -- even somewhat stolid and dull.  Herzog excels in the travel scenes, using drone-borne cameras to show the caravans moving through endless seas of sand.  Most remarkably, the film's interiors are splendid, as remarkable as the landscapes -- Herzog shows dimly lit Alhambras full of fountains, tapestries, with marble gazebos under domes and pointed archways surrounded by elaborate filigree patterns.  Beams of light pierce the darkness and, when Nicole Kidman stands in those lime-lit pools of sun, she glows with an otherworldly radiance.  The tiny desert hamlets and fortified villages (the film was shot in Morocco and Jordan) are all spectacular.  There are impressive shots of Gertrude and her guides wandering in deep, dangerous-looking slot canyons.  At the end of one canyon, rather predictably, we encounter Lawrence of Arabia with a boyfriend excavating the Nabatean city of Petra -- Lawrence has not yet become warlike and he talks like Oscar Wilde.  The soundtrack is conventional -- there are no operatic arias.  In fact, Herzog seems generally exceedingly restrained in the way he has devised this movie.  There are only a couple of avowedly Herzogian sequences -- in one, Herzog displays his love for the Roman poet, Virgil; the action stops while Gertrude and the Sheikh of the Druse discuss the distinction between "naming" and "describing" particularly vis a vis Virgil's Georgics (poems about farming) that I know from various interviews to be Herzog's favorite work of poetry.  In another scene, a desert ruler shows his contempt for the British by sending a dwarf from the gates of his city leading two men who ride backward on donkeys -- apparently, this is some kind of profound insult.  The problem with the film is that the love scenes although passionate enough aren't really Herzog's métier and he seems vaguely embarrassed by them.  Similarly, the film's structure is prosaically repetitive -- there is not one but two dangerous journeys through the desert, two times when Bedouins firing guns encircle Ms. Bell's troop and two occasions on which she gives lavish gifts to Sheikhs -- in one case the dueling pistols and, later, a pair of binoculars.  The question of whether Gertrude Bell is, in fact, a British spy is left curiously confused -- we see her indignantly turning down the request that she spy but her intelligence and maps turn out to be fundamental to the British management of the Middle East. 

In general, this was an ill-advised project for Herzog.   The film doesn't succeed.  Herzog can't claim that control was wrested from him -- he both wrote and directed the movie and seems to have had a large budget.  The problem is that the material is formless and would have been better managed as a two-hour documentary.  Kidman is radiant and Herzog seems to adore her, but the picture is a little bit dull.  It's certainly not as bad as its reputation and, if the viewer has an interest in this subject matter -- which is intrinsically fascinating -- the picture is worth viewing.