Upon its release in 1990, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky received mixed to negative reviews, perceived by many critics as a pompous, ponderous piece of artsy foofaraw, paling in comparison to its more elegantly conceived source novel. This might cause a contemporary viewer to assume it as a misstep, or at least inconsistent with then-current aesthetic for this kind of high-toned, expensively produced adaptation. In fact, it’s neither. A continuation of the same themes the director had been exploring since the beginning of his career, the film presents a dialectic of submission and control advanced through the implementation of color, imagery and sound, the dialogue reduced to a countervailing surface aspect, merely signaling the depths which these other elements will plumb. The dreamy visual style, meanwhile, falls in line with a run of similar literary period pieces from this era, landing somewhere between Out of Africa and The English Patient, yet shot in a far more dynamic and interesting manner. To reduce it to a pale imitation of its source text is to foreclose the horizons of what a cinematic adaptation can achieve.
The story concerns a trio of Americans traveling through North Africa in the late 1940s, traversing lands that had recently been the site of one violent power struggle, and would soon fall under another, as these nascent countries sloughed off French and English colonial hegemony. The three are married couple Port (John Malkovich) and Kit Moresby (Debra Winger), a successful composer and less-successful playwright, respectively, and their wealthy gadabout friend George Tunner (Campbell Scott). The mid-century equivalent of backpackers, they draw a distinction between themselves and mere tourists, yet also hint that their destination is a result of Europe’s atmosphere being ruined by the destruction of the war. Their journey is also defined by the same relative concerns as many vacationers, trying to summon up a sense of self-satisfaction via proximity to ancient, ageless landscapes, enjoying a reflective glow of sophistication in being able to appreciate such out-of-the-way wonders.
Instead they find a mirroring sense of ennui, poor accommodations, and swarms of flies. Along with this comes a paired case of sexual dysfunction, as Port pursues an ill-fated foray into the local sex trade, and Kit falls into bed with George after downing several bottles of his champagne. Things get worse as Port grows more jealous and frustrated, trying to shake off both the couple’s nagging third wheel and an exceptionally annoying mother-son duo they keep running into. A travel writer who hates traveling, Mrs. Lyle (Jill Bennett) is accompanied by her grotesque manchild son Eric (Timothy Spall), who’s perpetually scraping around for beer money and cigarettes, items which fall outside of the per diem allotted by his controlling parent. This leads to a route pushing deeper and deeper into the heart of the Sahara, an itinerary that will have dire consequences for the couple, even as it allows for a purgative course of clarification about their relationship and individual identities.
Advancing a dynamic introduced in early efforts like Before the Revolution, and developed further in Last Tango in Paris and other work, the approach here represents a development of the prevailing concerns of the ‘70s erotic drama, transitioning into a more conservative era of studio filmmaking. Less interested in pushing boundaries than examining the shape of existing ones, it illustrates an eroticism of emptiness expanded upon by its stunning desert vistas. Sex is not so much carnally depicted as incessantly gestured towards, instantiating its performance within a broader context of social attitudes. In this case, the choppy motions of a dying relationship, and the fumbling attempts at a leisure experience outside its uncomfortable rhythm, are positioned against a similarly collapsing political circumstance, demonstrating how the desire for connection is habitually routed through an innate predilection for control.
In the film’s early stages, the scenes and scenarios it presents are familiar: the ancient, sun-bleached stone buildings, the souk and its accompanying crush of gabbling humanity, hijab-clad women breaking into sporadic ululations. But as the plot progresses, the usual exoticism bleeds away and a sense of mania sets in, inspiring questions as to what the characters are seeking in this increasingly forbidding landscape. Is it a pure illusion of autonomy as their marriage spirals into chaos, or some more instinctual impulse? That the movie does not explicitly answer these questions should not be seen as a sign of vapidity, but as part of a push toward something greater, placing it on par with Paul Bowles’ original novel, rather than a shadow thereof. Just as The Conformist probed at the dark, hollow heart of fascism, this film interrogates the essential void that inspires the colonialist impulse.
The Sheltering Sky reaches its highest point when, somewhere near the Nigerien border, the couple becomes separated. Kit pursues a wordless romance with a desert tribesman she meets after stumbling upon a caravan, a tryst that serves as a full blooming of nascent Orientalist themes, which are at the same time consistently subverted. Rather than a man renewing his virility through the pursuit and domination of a veiled, alluring female, as Port fails to do early on in a Berber encampment, or a florid rape fantasy, as occurs in the novel, she is the aggressor, and it’s a covered man that draws her attention. Clad in men’s clothing, her hair shorn into a boyish cut, she scrutinizes the stranger Belqassim as he stretches seductively across a mat. The relationship this scene engenders, however, is not one on any more equal footing than her previous, culminating with her entering a stable of wives, housed separately to accentuate her status as a captured prize. The mystique of the unknowable is again sexualized, but in a fashion that illustrates how exoticism goes both ways, and that the colonial overlord is as much enthralled to their subaltern as they are patently in charge. As in von Sternberg’s Morocco, the desert represents both oblivion and escape, the erasure of self in pursuit of some kind of ecstatic release from the demands of control.
This effect could not be achieved without the beautiful work of DP Vittorio Storaro, a frequent Bertolucci collaborator, who makes marvelous use of the setting, assembling a rich, commingled palette of blue, orange, yellow and brown. Predicting their eventual rupture, Kit and Port are routinely shot in contrasting lighting, even when sitting in the same room. The expressive, slightly unreal presentation of color, perspective and landscape is at times reminiscent of Raúl Ruiz, but here the scale of the background feels truly massive, progressively dwarfing the characters and their piddling problems. The dunes stretch out forever, moving beyond a binary world of clear-cut distinctions toward something menacingly ineffable. Here, that horizon stands in for the nullity of all that lies beyond human control, setting the stage for a forceful collision of pure fantasy and emotional realism. Against this ever-wider backdrop, the core couple has no choice but to wither in the heat, the details of their dramatic pairing crumbling to dust, scattered into nothing against the infinite stretch of a pure blue sky.
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