THE director of this epic celebration of the brief life of Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) is the much-lauded New German Cinema auteur Werner Herzog — perhaps raising fears of a bloated invocation of Bell’s extraordinary exploits in the era of TE Lawrence. Yet it’s not a bleak excursion into alienation by the man named by François Truffaut as “the most important film director alive”.Queen of the Desert (a repellent title) veers far from what we might have expected of Herzog. His first film in six years, it is curiously mainstream in its gentrification of Bell’s cushioned early life — and on to the desert imagery (which, like the music, owes too much to David Lean’s 1962 Lawrence of Arabia) and the singularity of a young pre-modern woman breaking free of her Downton Abbey-style childhood to stride forth into the violent sands of the Middle East with little physical protection and facing huge cultural animus.So everything depends on the image of Bell. While the truth of this portrait can on...
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