I've probably seen this at least 3 times over the years, most recently yesterday. I note that my earlier rating carried over from imdb was a 9. This surprised me because I don't rate many movies over 8, and if I hadn't found I'd already rated it, I would have only given it a 7. Perhaps I was feeling romantic at the time.
Truth is it is a flimsy story that often lurches into the preposterous. The core characters are obnoxious. The obstacles they have to overcome are consequences of their own arrogance. And they fail.
It is full of tropes borrowed from writers like Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. All the natives are blank spaces. We even have kindly Bedouins saving the protagonist from death. From an author who is himself a person of colour, this is staggering stuff.
It's a beautifully crafted movie, and Scott and Fiennes are positively hypnotic, which is probably why I once thought so highly of it. But with the passage of time, and in the cold light of day, it really is only a mirage.
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Reply by Jacinto Cupboard
on May 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM
To be fair, that was a quarter of a century ago, a long time before Awards became political beyond the odd recipient going off the reservation in an acceptance speech. Also, it wasn't a stellar year for films, with the other nominees not being great films either, tho critics seemed to love Fargo and it sometimes makes lists of 'movies that were robbed of Best Picture'.
I think what I was pointing to wasn't that TEP was a bad film, but the 90s seemed to be a period in movie making where style triumphed over content. All those Merchant Ivory productions and their imitators. Call it the Miramax/Weinstein effect maybe. It was a time when Art House became mainstream, but in a lot of cases, like TEP, the actual stories didn't merit 2 hours or so of movie. I guess what I'm also saying is that I too got sucked in by this.