Other Titles • The Sheltering Sky • Himmel über der Wüste (1990)
Synopses for The Sheltering Sky (1990)
1.
Master filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci applies his considerable talent to this haunting adaptation of the Paul Bowles novel. John Malkovich and Debra Winger play Port and Kit Moresby, characters loosely based on Bowles and his wife Jane, who flee New York for North Africa, where they hope to find mystical truths that will reignite the spark of their marriage. But instead they lose their moral bearings (with help from a friend, played by Campbell Scott, who has an affair with Kit) while traveling deeper and deeper into the Sahara. Before long, what started as a vacation at exotic lodgings has descended into a tour of hell, as they stumble farther and farther into an unknowable spiritual territory. Though long and at times slow-moving, the film features marvelously nuanced acting by Malkovich and Winger and visionary filmmaking that makes the landscape at once picturesque and threatening. --Marshall Fine
(17 votes)
2.
Port and Kit Moresby (John Malkovich and Debra Winger) are American artists and self-styled "travelers" (as opposed to tourists) exploring Saharan Africa. Their 10-year marriage is strained enough to be threatened by the presence of their boorish companion, Tunner (Campbell Scott), who has designs on Kit. The couple's restlessness, along with a kind of fascination with their own estrangement, keeps them moving further away from civilization and from infidelity. Port grows ill, however, and Kit finds herself alone in the desert, cut off from everything she knows. Director Bernardo Bertolucci and director of photography Vittorio Storaro fabulously capture the forbidding beauty of the Saharan locations, as well as Malkovich's brooding self-assurance and Winger's artless sexuality. The color schemes of red and blue serve the story of lovers who live on different emotional planes. Paul Bowles, the expatriate author whose semiautobiographical novel is the basis for the film, comments on the action as a narrator and one-man chorus. He warns Kit, and the viewer, that life is far more finite than one habitually imagines, and that the chance to put things right will not wait forever.
(16 votes)
3.
A woman's dangerous and erotic journey beneath….
Are you tourist or traveler? Kit (Debra Winger) and Port Moresby (John Malkovich) find the distinction important. A tourist wants comforts of home. A traveler seeks adventure. Kit and Port are travelers, drawn by desire and destiny to the Sahara in an attempt to recapture the love they once shared.
Bernardo Bertolucci, the Academy Award-winning director behind such provoctive films as Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor, delves into the hearts and mind's intimate recesses in The Shelter Sky, from Paul Bowles' haunting book. Powerful performances fuse with Vittorio Storaro's cinematography (New York Film Crits Award) and the Ryuichi Sakamoto/Richard Horowitz score (Los Angeles Film Critics and Golden Globe Awards) for a rich, daring experience evoking the traveler in us all.
(15 votes)
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