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Pussy galore >> Passion in the Desert examines man/leopard love by MATTHEW HAYS
One thing is certain: for her feature directorial debut, Lavinia Currier took on a monumental task. She began the project seven years ago, contacting animal trainers and asking them to prepare some leopard kittens from a young age, so that they would be relatively well-trained in dealing with actors before a camera. The resulting intimate interactions between lead actor Ben Daniels and the leopards onscreen are indeed impressive. Daniels plays a soldier/explorer who, when separated from his platoon after an attack, becomes lost in the desert. Dazed and dehydrated, it looks like it's lights out for our hero until the leopard finds him and leads him to water, and allows him to share in the feed from her hunt. Currier's central challenge is the film's downfall: this premise is a bit too hard to swallow (I know a couple of men who claim to crave pussy, but this is going just a bit too far.) We are supposed to believe Daniels falling for the cat, the romance culminating in a man/leopard love scene that ends up more a wonder of animal training than a believable cinematic act (the cat licks Daniels as they embrace; Daniels licks back). Then the film delves further into unintentional comedy as a leopard male shows up on the scene, and Daniels' cat girlfriend shows her true spots by choosing to dally with the leopard rather than her human love interest. Daniels is overcome by jealousy as the plot thickens--but this isn't something a simple paw across the face can solve. You get the idea. Perhaps Balzac's tale, which was highly controversial when it was published, is so outrageous and outlandish that it defies cinematic adaptation. It's a pity, because Currier and the actors (both human and feline) are all doing their best here. But Passion in the Desert is simply a reminder that the old adage is probably true: there's some great literature that doesn't withstand the shift to celluloid. Passion in the Desert opens Friday, June 26
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It's not terribly easy to know what to make of a film like Passion in the Desert. Here is a film, based on the 19th-century short story by Honoré de Balzac, essentially about a Napoleonic soldier who winds up falling in love with a leopard while lost in the Egyptian desert. No, I'm not kidding.