The Sheltering Sky

Rating:
Summary: Conjures breathtaking feelings of eternity...
Review: the transfixing passing of events in a place where time stands still...with evocative imagery, stunning scenery and a sense of bittersweet loss permeate this film...
viewing it opens doorways to the soul....a near-Masterwerke...

Rating:
Summary: nice try but not quite
Review: There's a beautiful film in here which captures all of the passion, beauty, horror, and mental devastation of the novel. Unfortunately, you've to wait an hour and a half to get to it. Only when the miscast actors stop talking (i.e. Malkovich dies) does the real story begin, and what a great story it is. The lost American loses her ability to communicate and what's left is the image, the essence, the grand surrounding. As vast as it is empty, the setting envelops and virtually kills the old self, a new one (or an old one docile) emerges but she too can cope only slightly. The score here is wonderful if perhaps wrong. The cinematography is about what you'd expect from Vittorio (ne c'est pas rein si no par excellence). Bertolucci has always been at his best when he let the strange silences and voids of human communication (with himself, the environment, etc.) take over...this is no exception. The film is wonderful, but only after the drunkeness of the first hour and a half.

Rating:
Summary: frightening revelations
Review: this film has a haunting quality which makes it almost frightening. Although the young American couple, who are protagonists of this film, travel deeper and deeper into the North African desert in search of a self-revelation that will help them save their relation, they only find self-destruction. In the midst of the frightening nothingness of the inmense landscapes, and the still more frightening nothingness of the increasingly evident impossibility of communication (and not only with the natives), each of them feels compelled to confront what they really are, to look inside themselves. What they see there finally destroys them in a shattering moment (superbly performed) of true, if unbearable, revelation. A very good film, although it doesn't follow many of the aspects of the novel that would help the audience to understand better this story.

Rating:
Summary: Grand illusion
Review: This film is not for realists. Like an abstract or even impressionist painting, the viewer must allow for the emotional and sensual to speak to you. There is another main character in this film...the desert and culture of the place and time. It is more forceful than the self-absorbed personalities of any of the others. Ultimately it consumes them all. And that is also the theme of this movie.

Rating:
Summary: characters never convincingly reveal themselves to us
Review: This film just doesn't work because we never really are given enough information about what is going on with these characters. if the actors are going for subtelty, its too subtle. Malkvovich just doesn't have the right kind of personality to project (or have) the kinds of thoughts Bowles' character Port has. Malkovich plays mocking and witty very well so he was perfect for Dangerous Liasons but he does not play sincere well so to cast him as the tortured intellectual Port is an odd choice. And Debra Winger is wrong too. Her Kit is rather flat, she projects none of the troubled dimensions and barely restrained restless energy that the novels character has. In fact Port and Kit in the book are really more like brother and sister (in the Cocteau sense, mirroring and protecting each other, like child companions) than man and wife because what unites them is not sexual attraction. In the novel we meet Port in a very late phase of his discontent, the terminal phase, and nothing short of a tete a tete with oblivion will do for him. Life in his view is nothing but nasty brutish and short and so he sees no reason to prolong it, all that can be done is to heighten the sensations the unbearable circumstance of life arouses. A sort of romantic poets vision, or its American equivalent (ie Poe) who Bowles loved. Kit also can not quite find the will to live within the normal dimensions of the world but she still has a strong life urge though(often erotic) and this is what creates the rift between them(one suspects in the novel that Port is homosexual). And that rift is only partly camouflaged by the third party friend of both played by Campbell Scott(whom both characters desire and so their sexual desire, ironically, tears them apart). Scott is a boring actor but then his character isn't supposed to be as multidimensional as Port and Kit, he simply mediates between these two creative souls . The actors don't convey any of this though. The actors just don;t seem to know what they are supposed to be doing with these roles. Part of the problem is that what takes place between Kit and Port is non dramatic, anti-climactic, all that they have been through together took place before they arrived in North Africa. We meet them when they are already stranded from each other, this works very well in the book because we are given enough clues to understand what their history together has been. The movie remains a big blank page though. Desert footage serves to fill space but doesn't tell you much about the real drama of Sheltering Sky which is the unraveling psychic horror that Port is experiencing. Its just not there in this film. Malkovich isn't the right actor but even the right actor couldn't pull this off in all probablity( a young Terence Stamp perhaps.., he had the haunted and isolated, utterly cut off aura necessary). The long ending is a beautiful piece of cinematography( it pleasantly just sort of drifts along like a lullaby for the eyes, what more lovely thing than a caravan moving by night under stars?) but nothing more and one imagines even those involved in the making of this were asking themselves by films end, "now what is this picture about?". I love Bertolucci films, he is perhaps the best director out there still making intelligent movies. Since there are so many bad movies out there this one gets three stars because even though seriously flawed it still attempts something more interesting than most other films which set their sites so very low and so may succeed but to no great consequence. A sort of beautiful failure. Read the book.

Rating:
Summary: What A Beautiful Film
Review: This has got to be one of the most visually beautiful films I've seen in quite some time. Although you must tolerate the idiosyncracies of some artists and affluents, it's worth it to appreciate the richness of the desert. If you're bored at the beginning, just hang in there. As the changes occur for the characters, the film becomes increasingly beautiful, leaving one somewhat intoxicated in the unworldly way deserts do.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful & Intricate
Review: This is one of my favorite films. It's erotic, exquisitely shot and exhaustively long, but will leave a lasting impression whether you love it or hate it. Based on the book by Paul Bowles. I wouldn't think of putting John Malkovich and Debra Winger together but I think it works.

Rating:
Summary: Voyage au bout de la nuit
Review: This movie after a novel by Paul Bowles is about the danger of
going beyond the horizon, leaving the protection of the sheltering sky to seek adventure, oblivion and answers. Kit and Port, an American couple bored with the NY jet-set life decide to travel around in Morocco for 1 or 2 years. The journey begins in Tangier,symbol of European civilization with it's grand hotels, French cafes, but the more the couple goes South the more threatening the country becomes in it's strangeness. The impossible contact with Morocco and the estrangement of Kit and Port is symbolized by disease. Port dies alone in a French army camp in the middle of the desert, while Kit continues the journey to the extreme South until she reaches the last frontier of the country: Timbuctu, where the desert people trade Moroccan goods. There she's looses the last contact to her environment. Hiding her face like the desert people, she becomes the woman without a face, a nobody. Isolated in her prison she destroys her diary, only testimony of her experience and ultimate trace of European-American civilization. At the end of the movie, Kit is running through the streets of Timbuctu trying desperately to communicate with what's left when language turns out to be useless : money, but the market people don't know US$ and reject her violently. Back in Tangier, her starting point and gate into the foreign country, Kit realizes that she has lost everything by disregarding warnings and leaving the protection of the sheltering sky.

Rating:
Summary: Subtle,beautiful, Malcovitch and Bertolucci at their best!
Review: This movie may threaten some people, but once you get beyond that, it can open you into a wonderful space. Malcovitch, (probably one of the greatest living actors) and Bertolucci are at their best. I would love to use them both in my new screenplay!

Rating:
Summary: the best ever movie
Review: This movie should be seen by all classic movies lover..... please listen to the music and the scenary........