MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Pascali’s Island’ a Literate Terrain of Polished Surfaces

“Pascali’s Island” (Laemmle’s Royal) has such a serene, polished surface that, as you watch it, you can almost feel yourself sliding off the screen right into pearly “Masterpiece Theatre” space. It’s a film easy to recommend critically, but hard, in some ways, to like.

Writer-director James Dearden was the scenarist on “Fatal Attraction.” But his new film is a far cry from “Attraction’s” glitzy pathology or its tacked-on, market-research ending. This is quality film making with a vengeance.

The script is unfailingly literate, the settings--and Andrew Mollo’s production designs--are beautiful. The lighting and camera work, by Roger Deakins, are expert. And the actors seem to have plumbed every nuance. Their eyes glisten, and they speak with the exquisite modulations and immaculately pruned emotion of the best British theater people, which some of them are.

The story follows Turkish spy Basil Pascali (Ben Kingsley), becalmed on a Greek isle, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire--for which he has been supplying reports, almost certainly unread in Constantinople, for 20 years.

Pascali becomes involved with a visiting Englishman: an archeologist named Anthony Bowles (Charles Dance), who engages him as interpreter for dealings with the local pasha, then, with offhand gentility, leads him into a maze of deception in which one or both of them seem likely to be killed.

Also involved--to Pascali’s excruciating sorrow--is Lydia Neuman (Helen Mirren), an Austrian expatriate artist who immediately falls for the sandy-haired, diffident Bowles, despite years of unrequited Pascali passion.

“Pascali’s Island” has what many other movies lack: an interesting story. But it also has a strange, thin aftertaste. It promises more than it gives.

And, though it takes place in a exotic climate and time--1908, amid the distant rumblings of the coming World War--it has less pungent atmosphere than some old-style Hollywood kitsch set in similar locales.

The joke is that the story and characters of “Pascali’s Island” actually suggest that kind of kitsch, which may be, unconsciously, why Barry Unsworth’s 1979 novel appealed to Dearden.

Dearden has been unusually faithful to the book--published in the U.S. in 1980 as “The Idol Hunter.” Pascali still speaks through the letters he sends to Constantinople, which gives the story a double screen of elegant futility. Nothing can be changed by the time he writes about it, and no one is listening anyway.

But the book promises more than it gives, too. It becomes one of those chilly, chiseled, self-conscious literary efforts where the writing rarely breathes. The film--shot on the gorgeous Greek island of Simi--in some ways improves on the book’s stiff lyricism.

Ben Kingsley at first seems wrong casting for Pascali. This trim, neat, actor is playing a character described in the book as “an obese Levantine, scrounger and clown, one trouser leg shorter than the other” with bad eyes, several days’ stubble and no socks--all of which suggests Peter Ustinov or Philippe Noiret at their most raffish.

Yet Kingsley makes the part his own. He’s a superbly thoughtful actor, and he fits the book’s voice ideally.

Kingsley is so good he makes the entire movie work, and he’s well aided by Charles Dance, best when he brings out a cruel, manipulative streak, and Helen Mirren--with her pliant flesh and knowing air.

The story is about people so preoccupied with aestheticism and art--Pascali with his writing, Lydia with her painting, Bowles with the improbable Greek statue he unearths--that they’ve become putty in the hands of the crass pasha, the screaming, fat German entrepreneurs, the mysterious American holed up on his yacht.

But these characters only come alive when they discuss art--or when they’re swindling somebody.

Everything, it’s suggested, will fall apart; everything will decay--and, up in the hills, revolutionaries are waiting to sweep all this decadence into the sea.

The ideas in “Pascali’s Island” are really ephemeral, literary conceits. There’s the doomed revolt of the three aesthetes. There’s that buried 2,000-year-old statue, which probably represents eternal art in a promiscuous world. And there are all those despairing cries from Pascali to deaf ears in Constantinople, which have ceased listening to him, ceased caring.

“Pascali’s Island” doesn’t have a real sense of how a desperate Turkish spy and a man living by his wits might act. There’s no sweat or expertise or grimy fear in it. The movie starts to come alive when the swindle starts, but before that--and even after--these people behave more like professors on a Greek sabbatical, involved in a plagiarism scandal.

Yet, for audiences starved for literacy on screen, “Pascali’s Island” (MPAA rated PG-13, for adult situations) should be a treat anyway.

It’s rare that we get actors this good, sights this sensuous; to complain that the literary material is somewhat second-rate won’t mean much to audiences constantly exposed to the seventh-rate or worse.

The film suffers only in comparison to its intentions. At the right moment, Kingsley, Dance or Mirren can dig an artifact right out of the sandy script, make it shine and set this island of betrayal aglow.