A Leopard, a Desert, and Ben Daniels: My Antidote to Parisian February

The Desert of the Other: Ben Daniels in Lavinia Currier’s Vision

This afternoon, while Paris rehearsed its familiar winter aria — cold rain needling the windows, a sky the color of unpolished pewter, pedestrians hunched like minor existentialists — my soul defected. It deserted the damp boulevards and fled, without so much as a scarf, into the blazing, improbable sands of Passion in the Desert (1997).

Yes. That film.

The one about the French officer who strays from Napoleon’s army and, instead of finding glory, finds a leopard. 

The one that critics have called excessive, derivative, televisual, and other words usually deployed when a work dares to be sincere in a cynical age. 

The one that, for reasons both aesthetic and irrational, has taken up permanent residence in the more wind-swept chambers of my mind.

Let us be clear: this is not merely a film. It is a sunstroke with dialogue.

And at its center stands Ben Daniels, radiating a charisma so incandescent it could evaporate the Seine. 

His Augustin is not merely lost in the desert; he is existentially misplaced — a European consciousness dropped into an infinity of sand and silence, stripped of battalion and banality alike. 

Watching him, one realizes that uniforms are poor insulation against destiny.

Then comes the leopard.

Ah, the leopard! 

Not simply an animal, but the embodied metaphor of alterity — the Other with whiskers. The unknowable. The foreign. The shimmering, dangerous difference that civilization insists must be tamed, categorized, or shot at. 

And yet — and yet! — what unfolds between soldier and beast is not conquest but connection. 

A fragile truce between species. A silent recognition. A love that is not sentimental but elemental.

It lingers in me — this allegory — because it whispers something audacious: that the deepest connections may arise not despite difference, but because of it. 

That intimacy is sometimes born in strangeness. 

That the heart, when stripped of its regimental drumbeat, may recognize itself most clearly in what it was taught to fear.

And perhaps this is why the film refuses to leave me.

Because I love the desert.

Not merely as geography, but as condition. 

The desert as erasure of noise. As moral x-ray. As the place where one meets oneself without ornament. 

In the desert, there are no cafés to hide in, no clever conversation to deflect revelation. 

There is only light, and the terrible honesty of space.

And in that space: a man, a leopard, and the audacity of affection.

Yes, the film is flawed. Yes, it is grandiose. Yes, it occasionally wanders as if it, too, has lost its regiment. But so do we. And what is art if not a wandering that risks absurdity in pursuit of truth?

So here I sit in Paris, damp and wool-wrapped, while internally I am barefoot in sand, watching Ben Daniels look at a wild creature as though he has just discovered a new continent within himself.

Outside: February.
Inside: Sahara.

And for one improbable, sun-struck afternoon, that was enough to fill my soul.

By Giulia Dobre

Paris, February 2026.

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#Napoleon

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#theother