Wonderfully offbeat film!

Wonderful Movie

Purely Joyful Movie!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

A movie about women and men relationship, discovering distant land, finding some missing part of soul and orientalist perspective to non-western cultures. When you watch the story of Port and Kit, you question yourself. Bertolucci presents gloomy loneliness within a marriage.On the other side, you realize the importance of love on the verge of death.According to me,two movie scenes are so striking.First one: Port defines the distinction between tourist and traveler at the beginning of the movie:''Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.'' He defines himself as a traveler. Second one, Port criticizes our perception about time with these words :''"How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." Perhaps less than twenty.All the desert scenes, impressive songs, dialogues makes the movie attractive. Unexpected situations shows that life is so fragile. As a result, I enjoyed watching it.

I'm truly disappointed with this film, not in the sense of throwing something to the screen or cursing everybody involved, but in the sense of almost crying simply because when you heard the names Bertolucci-Winger-Malkovich altogether you want to buy the DVD, buy popcorn and more just to see how wonderful this is and the final result is a big empty in their lives and almost a waste of our time. "The Sheltering Sky" is like a great body without a soul, a tragedy. What's the point of having the most dazzling and beautiful cinematography of all when you don't have a story to tell, don't have something to say and a purpose? Nothing. It knows how to relax your eyes both in a good and bad way; the good way being the most fantastic images and scenarios you'll ever gonna see; in the bad way because after one hour it starts to get boring, tiresome, pointless and it goes nowhere. Again, here's a story of people from the high class world (played by John Malkovich, Debra Winger, Campbell Scott and others) that seems to find a beautiful and intriguing place to live in Morocco, Africa, to finally realize that life's not that easy in places like this. If the main premise of the film was to show the difference between travelers and tourists then what I saw was that travelers are dumber than tourists who simply enjoy all the things of a foreign country and then they'll turn back home (as Winger explains in the beginning tourists go into a journey thinking of returning home right after they got in the new place). The tourists will have bad luck, all kinds of disease, infidelity affairs and other bad things.It is a good film to look at it, its visual, locations, culture, you feel in a different place, but in terms of story it's very empty, with no profundity at all. I expected more from Bertolucci and this film. But when your previous film win 9 Oscars and it's a art and historical masterpiece called "The Last Emperor" is very difficult to quite recover from there, to release something that touches the same grandiosity. "The Sheltering Sky" tries to be an epic but fails by being meaningless, just images and bored talks between characters. I'm not gonna say nothing about the performances because they weren't good neither bad, just too low considering other works. Gladly I haven't bought the DVD, but sometimes I wish because the images presented are so unique and wonderful that you simply have to watch it and try to hold it in your mind, for relaxations purposes. Weak, weak, weak. 4/10

So what's it about ? Ahh, it's about how the world after WW2 is going to be without love. No. It's about the woman being treated unfairly in the west and the east. No. It's about the human being who can't find love yet; namely the desperate moment of living lonely whether with a dying educated who stopped making love, or a stud uncivilized who doesn't stop making love! At any rate, IT'S UNBEARABLE FILM. So it doesn't have the slightest ability to make me interest in whatever it says ! I didn't find anything interesting at all. I hated to see (Debra Winger), one of her generation's best actresses and beauties, in wasted time like this. The sufferance of her character was incredibly overmatched by ours during the watching. The pace is dead with nothing going on and long shots for the dark deserts. (Bernardo Bertolucci) fell in such a ridiculous love with the Arabian nights, shooting the moon from maybe 90 angles (these shots, great basis for tourist calendar, are really the only thing here to call perfect!). I bet he originally wanted to make a movie about the east's magic and vagueness (his east's magic and vagueness), however with the totally wrong material.I don't need to say that this is the meanest place to meet Arabian characters. They're all : pimps, thieves, whores, sex maniacs, mad women; it tells you a lot about who were the persons that the author went to meet in his trips for the east, if there was any !On the other hand the western characters are badly portrayed too. The old lady, her pathetically gay son, ..etc. But anyway, if this film wanted to show an ugly world then it did, but for what purpose ?!! If it was about the search for satisfaction as endless, then it's where I was eventually unsatisfied indeed ! There is something to be said, however it's shatteringly said. By the way, it has no end. I mean it's not good or bad, it's not even there. And yeah, the appearance of (Paul Bowles), the author of the book, at the end is one of the most embarrassing moments in the history of cinema; I believe the film didn't demand to be more surreal !Some might see that (Bertolucci) is a genius. After watching some of his works, I don't. In fact he's far from being one. There is lust and loss in his films, but mostly a lust for the loss of any good meaning or art along the way too !In general, a good story it ain't. A soft porn it strongly aspires after. An arty film about alienation it could be, yet so heavily done. Now, let me depose my objective alter ego to declare it frankly; whether it's (The Sheltering Sky), (Tea in the Desert), or even (The Sheltering Tea) it ended up as boring and worst of all pointless. It's not "I hate this film", rather "this is a film to hate" !P.S: While the film takes place in north of Africa during the 1940s, at one moment we hear in the streets an Arabian song by the great Egyptian composer/singer (Mohamed Abd El-Wahab), it's "Min Ger Leeh" or "Without Why" which actually belongs to the year of 1990, being the last one he ever sang!

The movie, I gather, is supposed to be about the eroding marriage of Kit (Winger) and Port Moresby (Malkovitch). Port Moresby? The writer of the novel, Paul Bowles, surely meant it as a joke but although I get the joke I didn't get the point.In fact, the point of the entire film was pretty much lost on me. Winger and Malkovitch arrive to do some touring in North Africa. Come wiz me to zah Casbar. And tell us where Rick's Cafe is located. Right. There is a hanger-on whom they've met on their journey, Scott Campbell. The trio do their best to make themselves at home in the strange city full of strange streets. They stay in a crummy hotel. They wander about and drink tea. No booze in Islamic countries, though my informants asseverate that there is usually some dynamite hash to be had.But if the point of the story is that Kit and Port feel their marriage dissolving, and that they're searching for something that will restore meaning to their bond, there's not much evidence of it. Yes, Port sleeps with a seductive and treacherous hooker. And Winger and Scott spend the night together after a debauch. But there's nothing to indicate that these were more than errant acts based on impulse, nothing resembling a recurring pattern. Kit and Port don't fight; they hardly argue. They may not be especially bright but they're not soulless either.They leave the city and travel to a smaller and shabbier tourist town. They manage to dump Scott somewhere. Then they board an overcrowded third-world bus and wind up with Port dying of some unidentified disease, a victim of the epidemic that has caused the closing of the only respectable hotel in town.She leaves his body on the floor mattress and wanders off into the desert's fringe, where she is offered a ride by some spooky looking nomads, who turn out to be reasonably human after all. They take her to a village compound made up of some unworldly looking multi-story adobe structures. Winger stays with the young head honcho for a while, getting to know him in a Biblical sense, until the other ladies begin to resent her presence and throw her out. She winds up at a Western outpost, tattooed but saved.Bowles, the author, makes small appearances at the beginning and the end of Winger's journey, voicing some pieces of narrative from the novel, which I didn't find enlightening. Somerset Maugham used to do it better.Bonus points for the photography. Bernardo Bertolucci may have let the story get away from him but he's got the desert and its denizens down pat. Some of the shots are extremely impressive, the ones that don't look like Bakersfield or Deming. Timbuktu, I was surprised to learn, is a small but flourishing city rather than a caravansary, no longer just Timbuk One. Another joke the point of which eludes me. If Terence Malick had been behind the camera there would have been inserts of the fauna, little lizards skittering around or a sawscale viper or something. Decent performances too.The first time I saw this I was swept up in the tale because I was curious about seeing where it would go, and then found myself engaged with the characters. It doesn't hold up as well on a second viewing. The mystery, what there was of it, is over.