I Dreamed of Africa:  drama.  Staring Kim Basinger, Vincent Perez, Eva Marie Saint, Ian Roberts, Liam Aiken, Garrett Stromen.  Screenplay by Paula Milne and Susan Shilliday.  From the memoir by Kuki Gallmann.  Directed by Hugh Hudson.  Rated PG-13.  Now playing at Bay Area Theaters. 

Forty years after Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, left her farm in Africa to return to Denmark, Kuki Gallmann moved from Italy to a ranch in Kenya with her husband and young son.  In the highlands near the Great Rift Valley she found rebirth, life and death.  Her moving memoir, published in 1991, has become a somewhat plodding, episodic chronicle. Those expecting another epic "Out of Africa," with its romantic sweep and lush photography, will be disappointed.  Africa itself, though, remains a compelling character on the screen.

Gallmann grew was raised on her father’s stories about Africa.  After a car accident and learning to walk again, she remarried and started a new life in Africa.  Learning to run the ranch in her husband’s increasingly frequent absences, she coped with pestilence, drought, monsoons and dust storms.  Her son, meanwhile, started a dangerous love affair with poisonous snakes.  In a voice-over narration, she says of her new home, "I’ve never been here before, but I feel like I’ve returned."  Despite the grand themes, the film remains curiously flat.  There is no great passion between Gallmann and her husband (nor a great white hunter), and no colonial gauze overlaying this postmodern vision of Africa.  The spectacular panoramas (filmed over four months in South Africa and Kenya) have taken on a dusty hue, breathtaking though they may be.

Kim Basinger as Gallmann makes her first appearance since winning an Oscar for her 1997 performance as a Veronica Lake look-alike hooker.  She has come a long ways from the steamy roles of "L.A. Confidential," as well as "Final Analysis" and "9 ½ Weeks."  Here transforms herself from a cosmopolitan Venetian woman into a tough ranch owner, running a tractor through mud, scaring off lions and facing down poachers.   Basinger does a commendable job, achieving a more three-dimensional existence than most of the other characters, except perhaps her dogs (standing up against a marauding lion) and the ever-present, ever-changing character of Africa itself. 

Eva Marie Saint appears as Gallmann’s aristocratic mother.  Liam Aiken, playing Emanuele at seven years of age, creates a convincing portrayal of a boy entranced by a strange new world.  Vincent Perez ("The Crow:  City of Angels") as Gallmann’s husband Paolo, remains a questionable presence, even when he is not off on safari with his whiskey-swilling buddies.  The Africans all too briefly pop out of the background to take on lives of their own. 

Hugh Hudson is no stranger to Africa.  His second film, following "Chariots of Fire," was "Greystoke:  The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes" (1984), which corrected the Johnny Weismuller image with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original Tarzan, in actuality an English lord who was shipwrecked in Africa as a boy and adopted by apes after the death of his parents.   However, the thrills of the fictional "Greystoke" seem lost in the present docudrama. 

Kuki Gallmann still lives on the Ol Ari Nyiro Ranch in Kenya, with her daughter Sveva and eight dogs, at last count.  She started the Gallmann Memorial Foundation in 1987 to promote the harmonious coexistence of man and environment, and has worked with Richard Leaky to preserve elephants and the black rhino.   Recently she published a collection of stories, "African Nights." 

Perhaps the real story here is our own collective dreams of Africa, which have been undergoing revisionism in books and films ever since Isak Dinesen’s book first appeared in 1938.  Beryl Markham’s "West With the Night" (1942) was accused of being a fabrication written by Markham’s screenwriter husband.  Whatever the truth, this remarkable book issued from an extraordinary life, as a pilot (first person to solo the Atlantic from east to west), horse trainer (first woman in Africa), royal consort and, like Karen Blixen, lover of Denys Finch-Hatton.  "Shadow on the Sun" was filmed for TV in 1988, starring the lovely but overly delicate Claire Bloom.

James Fox’s book "White Mischief:  The Murder of Lord Errol" (1982) completed the exposure of the decadence of the "Happy Valley" English community in Kenya during World War II.  The 1988 film painted an exquisite decadent gloss over adultery, murder and drugs.  Aging Sir Broughton’s young bride-to-be is greeted on arrival by her future lover (and murder victim) with a cool smirk, "Welcome to Paradise."

Francesa Marciano is another Italian woman who moved to Kenya in modern times, and in 1998 published a sharply etched novel, "The Rules of the Game," a sort of "Out of Africa" as written by Joan Didion.  In this novel, the Happy Valley hasn’t changed in the last generation or two, merely intensified the heady mixture of sex, decadence, drugs and decay.

Africa has always had a special attraction for European female expatriates.  Consider such intrepid African adventurers and explorers, mostly of the desert-loving English variety, as Gertrude Bell, Lady Jane Digby, Mary Kingsley, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Freya Stark (subject of the recent biography, "Passionate Nomad").  

My suggestion is to enjoy "I Dreamed of Africa" as a travelogue and a source to feed other dreams of Africa.  Read Gallmann’s book, read Beryl Markham and the other female African travelers, while waiting for someone to stage a full-screen version of Beryl Markham’s kaleidoscopic life.