She
was one of the few women T.E. Lawrence could almost stand—and that’s saying something.
Together with Lawrence, Gertrude Bell was instrumental in defining the
boundaries of modern day Iraq and installing the Hashemite Dynasty on the
throne. Oh well, nobody’s perfect. Bell tells her story in her own words,
derived from her personal letters and diplomatic memorandum in Sabine Krayenbühl
& Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad
(trailer
here),
which opens this Friday in New York.
Right
from the start, Bell’s Oxford matriculation was rather defiant of British
societal norms in the mid-1880’s. Thanks to the support of her indulgent widower
father, she managed to convert her passion for travel, particularly through the
Mideast region, into a full diplomatic position. At first, she was something of
an intelligence freelancers, dashing off reports on tribal alliances, but
eventually she was given an official brief of her own. She and Lawrence would
indeed be colleagues, but not necessarily friends. Arguably, she had better
luck forging connections with locals, partly due to the sexism and elitism of
the foreign office and partly because she was not the sort to suffer fools
gladly.
There
is no question Bell led a fascinating life—and for better or worse, her legacy
will be an awkward fact of life for decades to come. However, Krayenbühl and Oelbaum
are somewhat hemmed in by their approach. Too often, her letters home tell her
father she met this newly posted official at a diplomatic soiree and he seemed
like a decent chap, but, presumably for security reasons, she rarely discusses
her official activities in-country. It is only during the establishment of Iraq
that we really hear her addressing her ministerial duties.
Krayenbühl
and Oelbaum mostly play it pretty straight during the Iraq sequences, but they
clearly hope Bell’s complaints regarding British colonial administration of the
future Israel will reverberate with viewers. However, what is most distressing
is the omission of Bell’s role as a witness of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian
Genocide. Once again, one of the most censored and denied episodes in Twentieth
Century history is again edited into oblivion.
In
a stylistic twist, Krayenbühl and Oelbaum have actors playing Bell’s
contemporaries as if they were talking head interview subjects, some of which work
better than others. However, their judgement is spot-on in terms of the
archival footage they married up with words of Bell’s correspondence. Tilda
Swinton (who famously portrayed Orlando, whom Virginia Woolf based on Bell’s
friend Vita Sackville-West, another talking head in Letters) has fine diction when narrating the older Bell’s letters,
but her voice is not especially rich or distinctive.
Letters is fine on the
broad strokes of Bell’s life, but it is short on the telling details. It is a
competent introduction that is relatively successful humanizing its subject,
but it feels better suited to PBS than theatrical distribution. Recommended (with
limited reservations) as a future VOD pick, Letters
from Baghdad opens this Friday (6/2) in New York, at the Angelika Film
Center.
