Ashen in the Desert

Posted by Chris Clarke on December 20, 2009

There’s a scene in the 1998 film Passion in the Desert that does not appear in the Honore de Balzac short story on which the film was based. The short story focuses on the relationship between a man and a leopard: the film takes an entire act to get us to the beginning of the real story, a feat Balzac accomplished in fewer than six hundred words of text.

In the film, the protagonist — Augustin Robert — is at first charged with guarding a character the filmmaker borrowed from contemporary history: the renowned, eccentric, aging and thoroughly difficult painter Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis. It is 1798, during Bonaparte’s campaign to conquer Africa. Venture has been commissioned by Napoleon to document the scenic and cultural wonders of Egypt, but had failed to ingratiate himself well with the French soldiers he accompanied through that occupied land. Augustin’s job is to protect Venture from his fellow soldiers.

Mameluks attack the company, and Venture de Paradis and Augustin are separated from the rest. They wander in the desert, the old man’s frailty slowing their progress. He persists in painting as they go, even using the last of their drinking water to thin his paint. At length Augustin leaves the man, promising to find help and return. He doesn’t, and the real story — Balzac’s story — starts shortly thereafter.

In life, Jean-Michel Venture de Paradis actually died of either dysentery or the plague in Paris in 1799, having been there for at least two years teaching. In the film, he dies soon after Augustin departs, blowing his head off when he realizes he is failing.

The scene that has been playing through my mind comes just before that. The artist is dying of heat and thirst, and remembers that he’s put the last of the water into his paint pots. He drinks his paint. It burns his throat horribly. Lurid streaks of color, yellow and red and cyan, plaster his beard to his chin. He chokes uncontrollably.

The film is pretty, to be sure, and fantastic in the original sense of the word. The short story is in many ways superior. It is more understated: it does not hit the reader over the head with leaden metaphor the way the film does. It does not strain credulity as much.

But there’s something about the paint-drinking scene from the film that haunts me. Words are my medium, not paint. They make a much lighter palette to haul out into the desert, but these days they burn my throat every bit as much, abrade my gut, tinge my blood and breath.