Werner Herzog has veered away from Middle East politics in his long-awaited yet disappointly sappy biopic of Gertrude Bell.
The British archaeologist, writer and political operative, who was instrumental in marking out the borders of Iraq and supported Ibn Saud’s creation of a kingdom in Central Arabia, was a powerful woman in an unlikely time.
Sadly, Herzog decides to concentrate on the parts of her life that could be taken out of an episode of Downton Abbey.
The problems seem to have started with the way that Herzog approached the project. Speaking at the Berlin film festival, where the film has had its world premiere, the director revealed: “The film is about solitude, it’s about the tragedy of love and it’s about longing.”
Surely it should have been about an overlooked yet pioneering woman who surmounted gender prejudices and cultural gaps to quite literally made an indelible mark on the map. The most interesting and lasting aspect of her life was how she entangled herself in Middle East politics, arguably more important than the oft-celebrated T E Lawrence: indeed she was his boss.
But it is not to be documented here: Herzog's Queen of the Desert pales in comparison with David Lean's 1962 classic British drama about Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.
Herzog notes her political role, despite choosing not to celebrate it.
“The role that she adopted later in becoming the maker of kings, the so-called ‘Queen of the Desert’ is something that I certainly believe was not written in the book of her biography, it fell upon her,” he said. “It came naturally because she is an adventurer and a lover, and with her curiosity and with her poetry, she understood the world of the Bedouin so well that there was no one else around to adopt the political role that at the end of the film we see that she is adopting.”
From this statement it seems she took the job in government, not because of ambition or determination, but because there was no man equipped for the job.
Clearly Herzog was not the right man for the job of telling Bell’s story, which is odd because his track record suggests that he is.
Herzog is well-known for making films about very masculine men. It's no coincidence that the actor he is most associated with is Klaus Kinski, a brilliant talent but by all accounts something of a rascal. The men Herzog is famous for depicting in films such as Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and The Enigma of Kasper Hauser were singular, determined and powerful.
So it’s a shame that in what he admitted as his first and rather late entry into installing a female protagonist at the heart of one of his films, he has gone down a familiar road, defining her actions by her relationships with men.
Nicole Kidman playing Bell is terrible casting, unless you want Bell to come across as a bit feeble. The first act concentrates on Bell leaving England because she is too unruly to settle on a suitor.
She travels to Tehran and falls in love with Henry Cadogan, a British Legation secretary played by Jack-of-all-trades James Franco.
He gets away with playing a Brit, mostly because it’s important that the character is not from the upper echelons of society. As Herzog tells it, his background is the reason why Bell’s father refused her request to have his hand in marriage. A decision that Herzog suggests drove Cadogan to suicide, although he died later of pneumonia.
Franco describes a pivotal moment when Cadogan is playing billiards and makes a play for Bell as, “the most sensual scene Werner Herzog has shot”.
Well, it’s also probably the only one he’s ever shot. Herzog doesn’t have a future in romantic comedies, that’s for sure.
Once Cadogan is removed from the picture, the second act is taken up with Bell’s journey through what is now southern Syria, wrought with much danger.
On the journey Bell is befriended by a sheikh and talked through tribal politics; the only way the audience knows about her political lessons is in a scene where Bell walks out of a tent and thanks her adviser for his insights.
It’s hard to believe that Herzog doesn’t see fit to pass along any of this information to the audience.
Kidman referenced the aversion to the political aspect of Bell’s story – and Herzog’s possible motivations for focusing on her romantic exploits – in her interviews at the Berlinale.
“I think what is so beautiful about this movie is that you just see how beautiful that region is, the desert and the people, and being a part of it, certainly gives you a strong affinity to that,” she said. “I’ve always felt a pull to the desert, that’s probably the greatest pull for me is going places, broadening my horizons, broadening my thinking and being able to study and understand history. But I tried to get Werner to give me a history lesson in it all, and he said ‘Nicole this is too extensive’.”
And Herzog himself admits he went out of his way to avoid anything that could be seen as a comment on Middle East politics, particularly the current situation.
“It was a conscious choice and we should not go deep into that,” he said.
The borders that Bell was instrumental in creating were not “the best of all worlds”, he said, but clearly better than “the alternative”.
“The alternative is materialising and the alternative is no borders and Islamic State running this as a caliphate, which includes Lebanon and Israel among others and has Sharia law in it’s strictest form,” he said. “I would caution to go too deep into history and in fact what we are doing is not history, we are storytellers, and doing a movie and we have to distinguish between history and story and we are the ones who have to tell a story.”
So as Bell journeys through the desert, it’s done to a voiceover accompaniment of the letters that Bell and the married British Officer Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damian Lewis) sent to each other as she journeyed. From the film, it seems that the only reason she wrote her magnificent diaries that give an insight into life and the politics in the region was to satisfy her lover.
The film ends just at the point where addressing the political would have become unavoidable, at the close of the First World War.
Bell and T E Lawrence (Robert Pattinson, given the unenviable task of following in Peter O’Toole’s inimitable footsteps) are offered jobs by the British government overseeing the demise of the Ottoman Empire and ensuring British interests in the region.
It’s then that Herzog resorts to text on the screen to tell us the rest of the story, her role in deciding the borders, her death and burial in Baghdad in 1926, unmarried and alone.
artslife@thenational.ae
