...inasmuch as; here was a real-life woman who did so many extraordinarily adventurous things/exploits at a time, historically, when few men did the same, and who left a contentious legacy, who was by all accounts and standards exceptionally intelligent, and yet the story told here is almost devoid of drama, and we never gain any insight into what this astonishing (some might say, 'bizarre') person/woman was actually thinking at any given moment, besides extreme boredom during the opening scenes in her native England. Furthermore, the dramas of others' whose lives she affects are left entirely open-ended; her unfortunate cousin, love-sick to the point of stalker-like madness for the man who then proposes to her instead - and then kills himself in apparent despair when his beloved and intended goes home for 9 months and doesn't come back - the cameo young servant at the consulate in Tehran who hands her a letter from the mailroom while confessing that he would lay down his life for a woman like her, the faithful guide/sherpa on whom she totally depends during her long desert wanderings/travels and who has by her own admission saved her life many times...what becomes of all of them, we wonder? And are we really to believe that, having consented to write him many passionate and ardent love-letters after he promised her to 'put things in order' with his wife but returning to find out that (a) he hasn't, and (b) he has enlisted to fight in a fierce war on a dangerous front, that this strong-willed personality would meekly say "I see..."?!? Unusual though she was, by her writings we know her to have been an emotional poetic person as well as a shrewd intellect, with plenty of personal opinions, so we cannot blame Nicole Kidman for a vacuous performance but must surely place the blame firmly at the feet of the director. While Herzog has always avoided Hollywood cliches and pat conclusions or summations, in this film he goes too far with his open-endedness and leaves the viewer with far more questions than answers. I began Googling about Gertrude about a third of the way through the movie because I needed to understand better about her background, to try to gauge her motivations to various situations, but by the end of a protracted fest of beauteous desert shots plus mysterious Middle-Eastern music I remained basically baffled. Plus, Pattison's portrayal of T.E. Lawrence was tediously immature, which after watching Lean's famous 'Lawrence of Arabia' starring Peter O'Toole's perpetually shell-shocked hero was a bit indigestible. I do applaud the impetus to put a proper historical frame of reference on this long-overlooked political player and explorer who was also female, and I did enjoy the joyfulness of the (brief!) love scenes between James Franco's character and the (presumably) still very young Gertrude (Gertie? Apparently not - nobody dared to use any nicknames on this imposing person, so it seems...), and of course I very much appreciated the equality of Middle-Eastern characters juxtaposed with the then-colonial and frequently superiority-deluded British, though I was a tad troubled by a distinctly suspicious and hostile glance directly at the camera by an Arab merchant in a marketplace which made me wonder whether the crew had forgotten to get permission from people not paid to be extras?! Hmmm, more bafflement...
Review of Queen of the Desert
