There she is to encounter Lawrence himself, played boyishly by Robert Pattinson. 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. Bell’s father does not approve of this man and the liaison does not end well. 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. 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. Nicole Kidman makes some of the other characters look as small as Hobbits. But Herzog soon shows us that her beauty is unconventional only in that she is tall. 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. Bell commands opaque respect from the Bedouins and incites a doomed, suppressed passion in British men: an unfortunate repeat pattern of disaster which the movie leaves tactfully unexamined.
But where is the eroticism, the ambiguity and the danger of Lawrence’s O’Toole? I would have thought that Herzog would plunge, chaotically and subversively, into the erotic charge of desert adventure. The orchestral score even appears to quote from Maurice Jarre’s undulating Lawrence theme.
Bell is thought of as a female Lawrence of Arabia, and there can be doubt that Herzog had David Lean’s great picture somewhere in his mind as he made this.
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