UK/Italy | 1990 | Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
Logline: The plight of an American woman, and her husband, whilst traveling through the desert and villages of the Sahara, North Africa, in 1947.
Peter Bowles’ best-seller adapted for the big screen by master Italian director Bertolucci, co-scripted with Mark Peploe, and starring John Malkovich as Port Moresby and Debra Winger as his wife Kit, with Campbell Scott as their friend George Tunner, and Timothy Spall skulking in the shadows as Eric Lyle.
It’s an odyssey of two distinct acts; the first part sees the arrival of the Moresbys with tag-along nuisance Tunner to Morocco on an ocean liner from New York. They explore and laze, the relationship of Port and Kit is threatened by Tunner’s fancying of Kit, and of Port’s self-indulgent recklessness. The English Lyles (Timothy Spall and Jill Bennett) loiter in the same hotels, begging for money, offering a ride to the next village, sweating under the sweltering sun.
Kit hopes to re-kindle the relationship she’s had with Port for ten or more years, she hopes the exotic landscape and foreign culture will re-ignite a quashed passion, but Port seems indifferent, more interested in the peripheral sights and sounds, including the allure of a voluptuous Bedouin whore. Surely, this will cost him. And it does. Karma plagues him with typhoid fever.
The second part of the story is another journey in itself, as Kit is confronted with an immense loneliness. It is here that The Sheltering Sky becomes more than just a melancholic title, a hint of the darkness that lies beyond the blue sky. Dialogue dissipates as the camera lingers across the landscape, the sand dunes beckoning, the partially-masked faces of the Bedouin people staring deeply, profoundly, the camels barking, the local musicians wailing in the balmy evening air.
An unspeakable solitude is draped over the movie for the remainder of its time, an existential attraction to the nothingness of space being purely terra firma and the weight of the self upon it. Kit sheds her former existence as she stumbles through a pseudo-carnal experience with Belqassim (Eric Vu-An), a handsome Bedouin who finds the lost white woman a fascination. The Moresbys considered themselves travelers, not tourists (tourists are always thinking of when they’ll return home), but Kit finds herself the ultimate traveler; wandering lost, then found, yet still misplaced, adrift, mislaid.
Apparently author Bowles has condemned the movie, saying it should never have been filmed and the ending is idiotic. I’ve not read the novel, but if it isn’t faithful, it still works superbly; as a drama spiced with genuine eroticism, or as a sumptuous, but haunting travelogue. At its very best it’s a compelling study of dislocation between two lovers; strangers in a strange land.
It boasts terrific performances from Malkovich, Winger and Scott, with Spall’s unctuous, hideous Eric Lyle convincing repellent. Apparently Judy Davis and Natasha Richardson tried desperately to win the role of Kit. Curiously, the original casting was to be William Hurt (Port), Melanie Griffith (Kit) and Dennis Quaid (Tunner), but budget constraints (more money was earmarked for building giant forts in the middle of the desert!) dictated using actors with smaller fees.
The Sheltering Sky, with its evocative score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, authentic art direction and costuming, and the truly stunning cinematography from my favourite lensman Vittoria Storaro, is a brooding tale of love and despair, perfect for the heartbroken, the lonely exploiters, and those with quiet aching passions.
TRAILER:
The Sheltering Sky DVD (double disc edition includes a fascinating documentary Desert Roses shot at the time by the editor Gabriella Cristiani) is courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment, many thanks!
