Word: augustine
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...story, adapted from a short novel by the Honore de Balzac, follows a soldier named Augustin Robert (Ben Daniels) who is sent to Egypt in 1798 as the guide and protector of Jean-Michel (Michel Piccoli) an important artist/historiographer. Jean-Michel is on an official mission to draw, measure and document the cultural landmarks of the Egyptian dunes. Of course, the military party with whom he travels are little concerned with monuments or cave-drawings. They have been yanked from their homes and families to conduct a miserable campaign against the Mameluke Dynasty, marching around the desert with their camels...
...film, the fighting here is vicious, bloody, and decidedly unromantic. The Mamelukes eventually retreat, their scimitars proving rather ill-matched to rifles and artillery, but the French men are sufficiently rattled to move quickly on to another campsite. Jean-Michel, however, has not finished his drawings, and he and Augustin lag a bit behind. Inevitably, the two are separated from their unit, whom Augustin decides to hunt down so that he and Jean-Michel may be reabsorbed. "I'll come for you," he assures the artist, who squats beneath a desert sage mixing his canisters of paint...
Anyone who saw The English Patient knows that return trips aren't always easy in the desert, and Augustin soon discovers that he has no more idea how to return to Jean-Michel then he does how to find the lost regiment. His heat-stroked, knock-kneed peregrinations around the desert land him into new trouble, especially when he steals water from a Bedouin maiden. The resultant man-hunt sends Augustin hiding in a deep crevasse in a large, barren plateau, but no sooner has he escaped their swords than he runs into a whole new set of daggers, this...
...describe without inciting unintentional giggles. Unfortunately, Currier has the same problem, though her deadpan close-ups and unrelieved seriousness work hard to wipe those smirks off our faces. In fairness, much of what happens in this central chapter of Passion in the Desert is tense and engaging, Augustin must fight the leopard for water, food and freedom to move, all of which the leopard jealously guards, though it otherwise remains far more docile and generous than Augustin has any reason to expect. When the soldier discovers a gigantic facade of columns and stairs within the mountain (an identical twin...
...Cambridge native, Hardina occasionally brings her son Augustin, now two and a half, to work...