Berlin Film Festival

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some extracts:

Here’s the film’s official synopsis: “The film tells the story of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) who, as historian, novelist and member of the British secret service, played a decisive role around 1920 in setting the course for the new political order in the Middle East. As an educated young woman, for whom no suitable husband can be found in England, she journeys to Tehran. After a tragic love affair with diplomat and inveterate gambler Henry Cadogan, she decides to give up on her private life and discover the region as an explorer. Before the backdrop of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire she learns languages, translates literature, meets with Muslim dignitaries in Cairo, Basra and Baghdad and earns their trust through her pluck and respect. Predestined to be a mediator between the Orient and the British Empire, she contributes to defining the new borders in the region after the First World War. And then love enters her life once again. Werner Herzog uses the vast desert landscapes to depict the architecture of his characters’ souls. A panoramic epic about the woman who has gone down in history as ‘the female Lawrence of Arabia.'”

extracts

The film then becomes an episodic series of expeditions, during which conflicts are no sooner suggested than Gertrude is charming her way out of sticky situations with Turkish military, nomadic warriors and cultured sheiks. “The deeper we immerse ourselves into the desert, the more everything seems like a dream,” she says, in one of countless variations on the same theme. But the action is less dream-like than prosaic, despite ample helpings of spectacular scenery accompanied byKlausBadelt‘s swelling symphonic score.

A more dramatic shift occurs after Gertrude inadvertently casts her spell over Major Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damian Lewis), the unhappily married British Consul General in Damascus. But while he wears down her resistance and she pines for him while she’s alone in the desert, fate intervenes again as the war escalates.

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 …

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.

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