Alternative title: Pretension in the Desert. It's bearable until Michel Piccoli puts a pistol in his mouth. That's because few people on earth are as suavely assured as Piccoli in the presence of a camera, and because his character here, an artist tagging along with a regiment of Napoleon's army in North Africa, makes things interesting with his special aesthetic concerns: smearing fresh enemy blood onto his sketch of a post-battle scene, dabbing paint onto the spine of a lizard rather than capturing the creature for food, squandering the last of the drinking water to mix with his pigments. There is over an hour of running time remaining, however, when the golden-haired, lobster-skinned officer (Ben Daniels, speaking with a disorienting British accent), splits off on his own and transforms the movie into essentially a one-character drama, always a difficult stylistic exercise, and in this case a failed exercise, unsurprisingly ungripping. The officer quite soon squeezes through a crack in the rocks which would have been invisible to anyone but H. Rider Haggard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, and holes up in an abandoned ruin patrolled by a leopard. They sniff one another out, they cavort together, they dance (still another alternative title: Dances with Leopards), they share a deer, they snuggle up for the night, they exchange licks, and then the man becomes jealous of a second leopard and strips down to his bare skin and spots his body with mud. It comes to a bad end, as most love affairs will, though the statistics on love affairs between man and leopard must be meager. Written and directed by Lavinia Currier. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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