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Clip from 'Queen of the Desert' (2015), directed by Werner Herzog, featuring Nicole Kidman and Damian LewisThe film is a historical epic about the life of Gertrude Bell, the turn-of-the-century British adventurer who helped divvy up the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I. A contemporary of T. E. Lawrence, Bell was an uncompromising explorer and amateur archaeologist (in an era when moneyed enthusiasts could get away with it). Convincingly played by Nicole Kidman, Bell drives herself toward the desert with the cold gaze of the obsessed. Unfortunately, Herzog chooses to locate the source of her obsession in a laughably unlikely love interest: James Franco (an occasional VICE contributor), who plays a consulate secretary, orientalist, and gambler in Tehran. What should be the world's most fascinating man becomes, in Franco's hands, a squinting, disinterested adolescent with a flickering British accent. Every scene between the lovers is literally cringe-worthy, from their spontaneous translations—in rhyming English couplets!—of Omar Khayyám, to their promises of everlasting love, symbolized by an ancient coin cut in half. After Bell's father rejects their engagement, Franco's character commits suicide. The remainder of the film is structured not around Bell's solo desert adventures, which occur almost incidentally, but around her improbable mourning for him and, later on, her flirtations with other men.
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In the film, we encounter no such marvelous diversions. The entries Kidman recites are concerned instead with her latest suitor, or else with her new-agey connection to the landscape. Such moments are love letters to the desert with all the nuance and personality of a National Geographic spread: swirling sandstorms, suggestive rock formations, and—the film's worst offender—an abrasive pan-Arabian score better suited to a Putumayo CD.[1 March 1911] … The Shethatha Arabs left us. I made a bad map with a plane table and then photographed interiors and began measurements for elevations with 'Abud. A messenger came from the Mudir bringing us our dabiyeh full of semneh which had been stolen at Shethatha. Worked till nightfall.
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