Ray Pride

Shekhar Kapur wanted to be lost in the desert.

In his first feature since 1998's "Elizabeth," the 57-year-old Bombay-based director found himself shooting his period epic, "The Four Feathers," in the Moroccan desert. His driver walked a distance away. Kapur looked into the distance, the flat sands leading to the horizon. "No, go away," Kapur told him. "Come back and get me after dark."

And so he sat. "All I remember of the sound of the desert is the sound of his boots on the sand when he left and when he returned." What was it like? "You're left only with the thoughts in your head," he says over lunch at a noisy sidewalk café in Chicago. Construction noise and car horns sounded. "You could be at peace, or you could go mad."

It's 1884. Would-be career soldier Harry Feversham (Heath Ledger) is as anxious as his friends (including Wes Bentley) are to go to war, but when a massacre in the Sudan leads to the regiment shipping out, he resigns his post. His soul-searching once they've gone (and exiled him from their brotherhood) leads him to find his own way into the battle. He eventually disguises himself as a bearded Arab, trekking across the sands in the company of Abou Fatma (Djimon Hounsou), who becomes his mysterious guardian angel, a Muslim from a slave caste who is ostracized by all. The endlessly ruminative Kapur found Abou to be his guardian angel as well, and the film's end salutes him in an unusual way, underlining some sly elements about colonialism.

The film completed shooting before September 11, and Kapur notes that when the film was being made, everyone found Harry to be a ringer for Jesus Christ. "Now all they talk about is John Walker Lindh. It's interesting how a story works in the context of its time, no matter what you intend," he notes.

The acting is stiff, as these young soldiers might have been, but Kapur's grace is in how he captures the strangeness of the desert, as shot in shimmering widescreen by Robert Richardson (who has been cinematographer on most of Oliver Stone's movies). Whether lost in the raw expanses, tiny against unforgiving vistas, or shoved into the midst of a teeming hellhole of a prison with hundreds of other men, Harry is a man who must discover not only a reason to fight, but to live. It's the kind of movie that expands in your head afterwards: while elements of the story could be read as ambivalent, I think it's subtler than that. In fact, this $53-million desert epic becomes about the vastest expanse: the mind. Early reviews have called "The Four Feathers" boring: I actually found it to be one of the few studio features I've seen lately that opened up for me in the days after seeing it.

We talk about the idea of the art of being like poetry: concrete images or actions that remain suggestive, even elusive, to audiences, and certainly their makers. I wonder if Kapur, like some filmmakers, is reluctant to talk about themes. He's not, but he notes, "I have to tell you, part of what I'm going to tell you is dishonest. Dishonest because it's a reflection as I talk to you about why certain instinctive decisions were made."

The day after we speak, Kapur is scheduled to remix the film, repairing a chasm between the Eastern parts of the score and the Western music composed by James Horner. At two important points, he would be mingling the sound East with West, something he had not yet accomplished. "I have a mix that is a little over-dramatic that was done in a hurry, that even for my Indian melodramatic sensibilities is a little melodramatic. We tried to strike a balance, because this film, at the heart of it, is about falling into chaos. The Eastern part is order against chaos, and the Western part is your destiny against control, right? So it's the fight between order as represented by the Western cultures and chaos as represented by the Eastern cultures. Something's been totally transformed into Islam versus Christianity after September 11. Yet terrorism is chaotic. Even now the fight is between order and chaos."

He extends the metaphor to the foolishness of planning a career. His own trajectory has gone from his start as a CPA to being an actor to being an expatriate in London witnessing the sexual revolution (the subject of his next film) to being a director of Bollywood musicals to traipsing into the midst of a desert on behalf of Miramax and Paramount. "I think of floating down on a parachute, that's life. You're floating through life; you have these controls. 'I'm going to go right, click, go right. I'm going to go left, click. I'm going to go forward, this way,' these are your choices. You go through life that way. So when that event happens and you have the courage to look up, you look up and you realize there is no parachute! You're in free-fall. And all of that was an illusion. As a basic philosophy I've been fighting with lately, I looked at this film, and it's about a man who looked up, who thought he could totally control life. And one action, he realizes he's in absolute chaos!" Street construction reaches a roar. "And then he has to reconstruct himself through chaos in order to discover wisdom, and wisdom in fact means no finalities. Strength lies in accepting the contradictions of everything--that's wisdom. Going out to fight for my country because it's my duty, it's not wisdom, right? Harry had to find his reasons. He had to find wisdom."

"The Four Feathers" opens Friday.

(2002-09-18)

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