TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120390/1203420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 113 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 95

Tragedy Is Their Destination


Bertolucci makes a bleak, beautiful film of The Sheltering Sky

By RICHARD CORLISS


    Ever since its publication in 1949, Paul Bowles' The
Sheltering Sky has been praised for its portrayal of a modern
married couple afflicted with ennui, malaise, anomie -- the chic
social diseases that Americans of the postwar era picked up from
French intellectuals. But the novel has another ghoulish
attraction: it maps out the all-time nightmare itinerary for the
innocent abroad.

    Port Moresby (John Malkovich), the protagonist of Bowles'
story and of the swank, sexy, bleak and very beautiful film that
Bernardo Bertolucci has made from it, is traveling with his wife
Kit (Debra Winger) and an upper-class twit of a friend (Campbell
Scott). He lands in Algeria,  a hot, arid country where each
hotel is more primitive than the last and the transportation,
when there is any, is mostly by truck and camel. There are
pestilential insects everywhere; the breakfast tray comes with
a DDT spray can. When Kit isn't complaining about the heat or
the stupidity, she is sleeping with the twit. A local prostitute
tries to steal Port's wallet, and a loathsome Englishman filches
his passport. What other atrocities can he imagine? Perhaps that
he will sweat out a typhoid fever in a miserable cell in a
Foreign Legion garrison? Or that his wife will lose her wits as
the love slave of the sheik of Araby?

    Bowles made this caravan of horrors persuasive by
suggesting that tragedy was the destination his travelers
sought. His prose got under the skin of hapless Port and Kit and
revealed their itch for romantic catastrophe. But movies are as
different from novels as show is from tell. The director who
would adapt this treacherous tale must find resources other than
interior monologues and wan philosophizing. Bertolucci knew this
when, after conquering China and Hollywood with The Last
Emperor, he and co-screenwriter Mark Peploe approached The
Sheltering Sky. "Instead of using language and psychology, I
wanted to be more physical," he says. "I wanted you to feel the
smells, the heat, even the cold -- suddenly you see snow on the
tops of the camels. And in this film, the body language is more
eloquent. There is very little profound dialogue, thank God!"

    Toward the end of the movie's two hours and 17 minutes,
there is very little dialogue at all; half an hour passes with
hardly a word spoken except in Tamashek, the language of the
Tuareg nomads, with whom Kit hitches a fateful ride. But there
are many profound images of the desert in all its pitiless
grandeur, courtesy of Bertolucci and his peerless
cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. The wind sculpts mountains
and minarets out of the shifting sand. On a rocky spot where
Port and Kit have just made desperate love, the setting sun
alights for a moment as if in benediction.

    These panoramic vistas are no mere window dressing; they
serve as counterpoint and antagonist to the Moresbys. Kit,
always fighting the elements, will be blown away by them. Port,
like so many Bertolucci heroes a passive creature whose bravado
consists in allowing chance to work its will on him, at first
believes he will enjoy feeling stranger in a strange land. North
Africa, he thinks, will offer escape into adventure, exotic
peril, the seductions of oblivion. He is wrong. The desert
demands his surrender. The sand is quicksand; it will swallow
him whole.

    The fraternal twin to Sky in the Bertolucci canon is Last
Tango in Paris, his taboo-trashing melodrama about a displaced
American (Marlon Brando) who provokes a torrid, cloistered
affair with a young Frenchwoman. But the new movie is not about
sex -- or even, Bertolucci says, "the impossibility of love. It
is about the impossibility of being happy within love. Kit and
Port don't realize that the modern couple is an endangered
species. Couples are so attacked by the outside world that they
create a kind of fusion, a symbiosis. And that takes them,
eventually, to a crisis. They look at each other and say, `Who
am I? Who are you?'"

    Some viewers, who believe movies should be easy and
edifying, will say of Kit and Port: Such small people. But
nearly all of Bertolucci's films, from Before the Revolution to
The Conformist, from 1900 to The Last Emperor, are big canvases
holding tiny, forlorn souls. Because of the performers' power,
the Moresbys come alive onscreen as they never quite did in the
book. Bertolucci looks at Malkovich, the lizardly eminence of
Dangerous Liaisons, and thinks of Brando: "They are two
monoliths, unchanging, absolutely still -- and, from the first
moment, condemned." Winger, for too many years the great unused
actress of American film, is the perfect vessel for a woman who
must be a piece of baggage on Port's existential tour, then a
Florence of Arabia ministering to his illness, then the trophy
of an alien prince. "You can always hear the click of Debra's
mind," Bertolucci says admiringly.

    The horror of Sky is that at the end, you can see Kit's
mind click off. The beauty of the film is that it ultimately
locates a married couple's humanity in that horror.