Ben Daniels (who had a nice, grizzly role as Goat in the recent Doom) stars as wayward Napoleonic soldier Augustin Roberts, who is charged with leading painter Jean-Michel Venture de Paradisin (Michel Piccoli) around Egypt. When the pair becomes lost, Roberts strikes out alone and moves from desperation to near revelatory contemplation in a warren of caves, the remains of a city abandoned to the tides of sand. Roberts strikes up an unlikely friendship with a female leopardess he calls Simoom (the Bedouin name for hot, deadly wind) and as his life becomes increasingly entangled with the big cat's, he finds he simply cannot live without her.
No plot description of Passion in the Desert could do the film justice. What I've outlined above looks more like a second cousin to surreal schlock like Tanya's Island (in which Vanity seduces an ape.) Passion in the Desert isn't an easy picture to simply dismiss. (Though many critics do.) And it has a lot more to do with the notion of love and of living than it does with implied bestiality. When Robert's enters the desert and strips himself of all human pretension, his falling in love with a leopard is revelatory, not titillating. It's allegorical. And it's clear in the film that we're not really supposed to believe that Roberts is rutting with a big cat - he's fallen back in love with nature.
The movie itself is a truly magnificent piece of filmmaking. It is mesmerizing, almost otherworldly in its beauty and power. Director of photography Aleksei Rodionov (Orlando) captures the essence of the desert in striking tableaus of sand covered vistas matched with peerless blue skies. Roberts does an admirable job in an admittedly difficult role and director Currier knows how to pace her film perfectly. (It is interesting to note that the leopards used in the film were actually raised for the production; they are part and parcel of the picture - as if they were crewmembers.)
Passion in the Desert is at its heart the story of modern man. The message is simple: Having made our way from the safety of the jungle branches into the cacophonous valleys of our high tech cities we've lost touch with our animal roots. Currier is training her painterly eye on our cultural exorcism of what we see as base and our clinging to some higher, purer ideal. We moderns eschew nature and think only of the next world, of a consumer paradise where there will be no jungles, no deserts, just Starbucks with no lines and endless plates of cheese fries. But strip us of our cell phones and Hummers, strip us of our modern guises, and even we could do with a furry shoulder to cry on.
The poster art for Passion in the Desert says it all, Roberts, painted as a leopard, leaning over a pool of water in which is reflected the visage of the leopardess. Or, as the old saying goes: as above, so below.
