Königin der Wüste

Gertrude Bell is one of the most remarkable people (of either sex) to have ever lived...but you wouldn't know it from this film. Archaeologist, mountain climber, poet, translator, linguist, explorer, diplomat, spy, (to name just a handful of her many accomplishments) and all in a time in which women were virtually prohibited from doing any of those things, for the most part, and in territories that even men of the time feared to tread. In addition to being the world's expert on both Sunni and Shiite relations before, during and after WWII, she was charged with drawing up the boundaries for modern day Iraq. She was respected, admired and desired.

But, since she was female, it took nearly a decade to green light a movie on her life and then some man decides to make her life story an epic "romance" and, of course, make the MEN in her life central to her story. How heartbreaking that her story was so terribly contrived to conform to Hollywood's stereotypes about women and women's lives. And how more tragic that this film could not even find a U.S. distributer as of this writing. This is why we live in a world that thinks women make little to no contributions to history. We rarely tell their stories and when we do, we stuff the round peg of a remarkable life into the square hole of Hollywood sexist tropes, believing no one wants to see a film with a female protagonist unless she's spending at least half the movie pining over some man in order to feel whole.

While the movie does cover many of her remarkable accomplishments, my beef with the film is the need to weigh her story down with overly melodramatic, poorly written scenes of tragic love instead of celebrating a superlative life of unique and notable triumphs. I wanted to see more on her travels, her discoveries, her diplomacy, her efforts during the war. Just gender flip this film (although it would be hard to find a man of history as accomplished in multiple fields as she was) and you'll see how ridiculous is the script's focus on what was only one facet of the brilliant gem that was Gertrude Bell.

I urge anyone interested in history to read about this woman's life. Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, by Janet Wallach is a great biography.

Hollywood has perfected the fine art of trivializing and "romanticizing" women's history...yet again.

Queen of the Desert (2015)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Nicole Kidman plays Gertrude Bell, the legendary British woman who would tackle various things in her lifetime and she would become one of the most loved figures in history. This Werner Herzog biography would make you think the only thing she accomplished was dating the wrong men.

Herzog is one of my favorite directors and I think everyone was excited when they learned that he was making another feature film and that he was going to be getting an actress like Kidman. The film would eventually hear boos at various screenings and it would limp into American theaters two years after it was first released. It would get some of the worst reviews of the director's career and it only managed to get back $2 million of its $36 million dollar budget.

QUEEN OF THE DESERT isn't as awful as some people have made it out to be but at the same time you can't help but call it a complete misfire on many levels. I think the majority of the blame has to go to Herzog's screenplay because this is a film about one of the most interesting women in the world and yet there's nothing interesting about her told here. For the life of me I can't figure out why this film only looks at her love life and outside of some narration, we'd never know what made her special.

I'm pretty sure Herzog was wanting to make an old'fashion epic with a strong leading lady. The problem here is that the screenplay is just deadly boring and none of the emotions the film works for are ever gotten. There's no romance, no drama, no comedy. There's really nothing here to be connected to and you basically just sit there wondering how such a film could go so wrong. At 128-minutes the film really drags in spots and it's just a real shame that the end result was so bland.

There are some good things to be said. The cinematography and music score are both extremely good. The locations used look terrific and there's no question that there are some beautiful visuals to look at. I'd also argue that Kidman was very good in the role and delivers a good performance but there's just nothing on the page for her to work with. James Franco is okay in his role and Robert Pattinson is good in the part of T.E. Lawrence.

QUEEN OF THE DESERT is sadly a film that will probably be remembered for it bombing at the box office and it coming from a legendary director. Herzog has done so many wonderful films in his life that you'd think this here would have been a sure thing but sadly it was a major bust.

Queen of the Desert breaks form with several other Herzog movies: A female lead character, a grand Hollywood-like production and most interesting: a different perspective on the culture-nature dichotomy and the effects of cultural distance that almost forms the core of Herzog's work.

It tells the story of Gertrude Bell (Kidman), an English writer and traveler who became more and more influential in the Middle East region through her unprecedented travels where she formed bonds with several future postcolonial leaders. Later in life she became involved in politics and helped to found several nation states (and determine its borders), along which Jordan and Iraq through the Hashemite dynasties. She worked in close cooperation with T.E. Lawrence (Pattison).

It is always interesting to see what's left out of the story: her efforts to establish the new countries were far more extreme and tiresome (plus the real reason Iraq was founded: cost-cutting by the British Empire), her witnessing of the Armenian genocide and slave trade, her actual spying role, her relative poverty, illness and depression later in life. What is paid attention to elaborately are her love interests (well played by Franco and Lewis), both ending in tragedy. But too much are we watching a watered-down, Hollywood interpretation of Bell by Kidman and not the real strong and intelligent woman she obviously had to be handling the complexities of deal making in the region.

Yet some typical trademarks of Herzog still shine through: travel to unknown, unmapped places where people find their cultural beliefs and visions on reality tested. In Herzog's world, venturing into nature from the cultural boundaries of existence always leads to suffering and destruction, mankind being unable to conquer the forces of nature. What makes this movie then atypical in the work of Herzog is that Bell finds solace and fulfillment through that process. Also atypical is the time we spent inside: these scenes inside the bastions of power are unfortunately not the best in the movie, and in the landscape scenes, Herzog seems much more on his turf.

Herzog always saw himself as resisting the banality of the images film is projecting, but here he somewhat contributes to that process. Despite that Queen of the Desert is still very watchable, informative and yes, even entertaining.

Obviously the director of this movie does not understand the context of the middle east and he is taking this part of the world as a bulk and treating it as a whole. When in Tehran they speak Arabic, Tehran is in Iran they speak Farisi not Arabic, when in the market one guy is obviously Moroccan while the movie is narrating a middle eastern story (Amman Jordan) different dialect, and the Beddouin music always starting with Allah W Akbar which is a religious chant not necessarily specific to the middle east where you can find Christians, Kurds and a lot more ethnicity. To make long story short the director reflected his understanding of the ME based on orientalist concepts and not real facts.

I have to be blunt. Reading Gertrude Bell's Wikipedia entry arguably provides more thrills than watching Werner Herzog's misfire of a biopic. Although a contemporary and, as this film suggests, a likely friend of TE Lawrence, Queen of the Desert, doesn't even come remotely close to telling Bell's story with the same sort of grandeur and vision that David Lean achieved with Lawrence of Arabia.

Bell led a life of adventure and achievement, in a range of diverse locations and across a variety of disciplines that Herzog doesn't really even attempt to explore. Hell, the woman even had an interesting death (as far as deaths can be interesting I suppose). He only focuses his cameras on Bell's middle eastern travels. But then makes the mistake of trying to define much of Bell's life through a couple of failed and unfulfilled love encounters with men associated with diplomatic posts. A great deal of onscreen time is spent in various embassies and at different functions, that I'm afraid I consider time just wasted.

When Herzog finally decides to turn to the desert, we are presented with some breath-taking, but often quite brief scenes. We see her begin to interrelate with a number of Bedouin tribes in abrupt, fairly forgettable exchanges, which never succeed in portraying how she ended up being such an influentially historical figure in the region, whose reputation rivalled that of Lawrence himself. Then there are factual inaccuracies that Herzog allows/makes for no real artistic objectives. Basic things such as her being confined to Ha'il for 11 days, not over 3 weeks as mentioned in the dialogue. Occasional years and dates are mentioned onscreen, but shouldn't be taken too seriously. Using the film's timeline, the film appears to begin in 1902, when an obviously young Gertrude first achieves her ambition of travelling east due to her influential father. The only trouble with that is, by this time she was actually 34 and had made copious trips to the Middle East.

Queen of the Desert was both a critical failure and a rather huge commercial flop. It's such a shame that $36 million should be wasted on a movie that doesn't really begin to explore what made this independent, intelligent woman ahead of her times tick.