Passion In the Desert

Following the release of Cousin Bette and this offsetting drama, it would appear that Honoré de Balzac has replaced Jane Austen as cinema's literary darling of the moment. Set in the late 1790s, Passion in the Desert explores the strange romantic entanglement between a Napoleonic officer stranded in the Egyptian desert and a female leopard -- yes, a leopard. Ben Daniels (Beautiful Thing) is striking as the blue-eyed Frenchman, and his feline co-star radiates with equal on-screen magnetism.

Despite the film's constrained plot, which doesn't move beyond the man-beast codependency, and occasional bouts of silliness (be it the erotic scenes of paw play or Daniels flying into a jealous fit when a he-cat comes calling to their little oasis), first-time director Lavinia Currie sustains a mesmerizing rhythm. As a visual stylist, Currie -- with the aid of her accomplished cinematographer, Andrei Rodionov (Orlando) -- captures the desert's delirious vastness with a piercing brilliance comparable to that of The Sheltering Sky or Walkabout. But as a storyteller, she reduces the spiritual intensity of Balzac's novella to a preposterously literal definition of "pussy whipped." At the Avon Friday and Saturday, September 11 and 12, at midnight.

-- Tom Meek