The Sheltering Sky

CinemaSerf: When “Kit” (Debra Winger) and her husband “Port” (John Malkovich) realise that their relationship is running out of steam, they decide to head into the Moroccan desert and rejuvenate their lives. Things don’t quite get off to the start he’d want though as he quickly finds himself in an erotic knocking shop complete with noisy chickens whilst befriended by the rather sexually ambiguous and sweaty “Eric” (Timothy Spall) and his frugal mother (Jill Bennett). They have their uses, though, as his wife and their friend “George” (Campbell Scott) have headed into the interior and he wants to pursue. It’s upon this journey that we realise, through some narration, that nobody here has ever been especially honest with the other and that any solution that may emerge here will be, at best, an hybrid of what they wanted/expected or even dreamt. Though both Winger and Malkovich take the lead here, and deliver competently, I found it was actually the supporting cast that worked better at illustrating the toxicity of this scenario. Spall, especially, but also the native tribespeople who take part and who viscerally illustrate the contrast between our two amidst marital turbulence and societies that subsist amidst the arid, fly-infested yet beautiful villages of the northern Sahara. It’s that photography, reminiscent of the Jack Cardiff, that conveys a marvellous combination of the passive, the manic and the serene as the people gradually diminish into a timeless vista that for me, anyway, symbolised the superfluous nature of mankind and the irrelevance of our, largely self-inflicted, problems. As to the conclusion of the story, well I have to say that I didn’t really care one way or the other about these spoiled and rather selfish characters whose melodrama and peccadilloes didn’t really matter in a grander scheme of things. It’s that uninteresting story that dragged this down for me, that and the fact that Bertolucci seemed intent on peppering the film with sex scenes as if to compensate for a broader lack of something more substantial to demonstration any kind of emotional connection between just about any of these characters. It is a great looking film to watch but as a story I found it a little on the shallow side.