The decade after Ben Kingsley won the Oscar for his performance in the title role “Gandhi” was one of the most interesting of his storied, four-Oscar nomination career.
He’d been a respected but mostly unknown player on Brit TV for years when his life and career arc changed with that one epic role. But the movies were not his oyster, necessarily, immediately after that. So he set about building a career off that blockbuster by taking on a string of mostly smaller but prestigious productions that afforded an exotic looking actor who might have been typecast in “ethnic” roles a way out of that trap.
“Turtle Diary” was an understated English romance (Glenda Jackson co-starred) borne from rescuing captive turtles from a British zoo. “Maurice” was a literary period piece gay romance remembered mostly for introducing Hugh Grant to the world. “Testimony” had Kingsley starring as the Soviet era composer Dmitri Shostakovich, creating great art despite the cruel whims of Stalin and the dictators who followed.
And “Pascali’s Island” was an intimate, bejeweled period piece that parked the future Sir Ben in a love triangle cast opposite Helen Mirren and Charles Dance, trapped in the Game of Nations in the comatose years before WWI finally killed off the long-dying Ottoman Empire.
Kingsley has the title role, a little man under the illusion that he’s a big player on this small, Turkish-occupied Greek island. It’s 1908, and the dapper Pascali makes his living “translating” and “teaching” on the tiny island. But that’s just his cover. He watches all the comings and goings here asks questions and takes notes.
And this “secret observer” reports back to his boss in Constantinople, Abdul Hamid II, the sultan of the empire, “emperor father, lord of the world” in long, increasingly despairing letters that he figures no one has read in 20 years.
As he meets, befriends and becomes increasingly suspicious of an English “archeologist” (Dance) who visits the island and starts poking around, his formally informal letters lose some of their decorum.
“Lord of the World, why have you abandoned me?”
Dance’s Anthony Bowles is curious about a particular corner of the island, which he’d like a lease to explore. And he is plainly charmed when Pascali — who has offered his services as a guide, interpreter (and fixer) — introduces him to the exotic Viennese expat artist, Lydia Neuman (Mirren at her most beguiling).
As Pascali is asked to stick his neck out in translating negotiations for that lease with the local pasha (Nadim Sawalha) and his mistrustful aide (Stefan Gryff), as he faces warnings and bribes from a German (George Murcell) with “interests” on the island and the ear of the pasha, the ever-cautious, delusionally influential — “Everyone here knows me!”– Pascali starts to fear he’s being tricked and set-up to take a fall for whatever the Englishman is up to.
It’s bad enough that a rich American is anchored in the bay, supposedly arming Greek rebels there for a revolt.
If heads roll, will Pascali’s be one of them?
Writer-director Basil Dearden — he scripted “Fatal Attraction” — takes his time setting up the world of Barry Unsworth’s novel. He introduces us to Pascali’s routine, and lets him over-share in every introduction — son of a Maltese father he never knew, a half-French mother who got around. We see him questioning a dismissive desk clerk and sneaking off to search Bowles’ room even as he’s sharing ouzo with him and Lydia, whom he’s just introduced.
Many of his exchanges, in Turkish, with the pasha and others, are left untranslated. Kingsley lets us see the direction such negotiations, with hints of contemptuous disregard for him and outright threasts, are going, just with the barely-concealed panic in Pascali’s eyes.
A syp too-long-undercover, Pascali is lonely for friendship and “relationships” of any sort. But as Pascali spies on his “friend” Bowles, catches him skinny-dipping with the free-spirited Lydia, whom Pascali adores, and makes arrangements for the man’s archeological investigation, he warns him.
“The pasha is not a man to be crossed.”
Dance reveals Bowles’ English arrogance not just in his patented hauteur, but in the way he upends a pleasant series of arrangements with the pasha, and with the odd remark about Turks in need of being “taught a lesson.”
Pascali’s place in this power dynamic has him indiscreetly protesting his frustrating connections with Constantinople, as if seeking Bowles’ pity as the situation turns more complicated and more fraught.
His “world” is ending, the “empire” that’s employs him is dying. And the Anglo-German intrigues are beyond his control, hinting at the horrible conflagration to come.
And through it all, Kinglsey puts on a master class in acting understatement. The coiled fury of “Sexy Beast” and sublimated rage of “House of Sand and Fog,” high water marks in the glorious third act of his career, were to come. And hints of this subtler turn would echo in under-appreciated later-career films such as “The Spider’s Web.”
Honestly, I’ll watch the man in anything as Kingsley classes up quasi-epics such as “The Physician” and delights in his rare comedies — “Learning to Drive” and “Daliland” among them.
It is “Pascali’s Island” that I always go back to as a yardstick. Kinglsey made better films, but the understatement and solitude of this role makes this film my favorite.
The intrigues are reasonably well-handled. The finale is grimly anti-climactic. But the performances are to be relished the way the actors, no doubt, relished their working vacation on the Greek islands of Symi and Rhodes all those years ago.
Rating: PG-13, violence, nudity
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, Charles Dance, Nadim Sawalha and Kevork Malikyan.
Credits: Scripted and directed by James Dearden, based on a novel by Barry Unsowrth. An Avenue/Lionsgate release on Tubi, other streamers
Running time:
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