travelers without a destination
by Douglas Messerli
Mark
Peploe and Bernardo Bertolucci (screenplay, based on the fiction by Paul
Bowles), Bernardo Bertolucci (director) The
Sheltering Sky / 1990
Although I had seen Bernardo
Bertolucci’s 1990 film, The Sheltering Sky when it premiered,
I wasn’t truly looking forward to watching this rather long (138 minutes) film
again. I had taught Paul Bowles’ original fiction several times at the
University of Maryland, and I remembered the film as a rather plodding and straight-forward
rendition of a work that, at least when I first read it, seemed far more
suggestive and even mysterious. Bowles himself has written, “The less said
about the movie the better.” As writer Frederic Tuten commented on my review,
"Hard to make a film of that novel. Much of it is a gorgeous National
Geographic film."
Perhaps I should
add that in Sun & Moon journal I published several small pieces
by Paul Bowles as part of his "Points in Time."
This
time around I liked the movie much better, although I still found it, at times,
a rather a flat-footed version of the original. But then, perhaps that was part
of the problem with the original fiction as well, wherein the character Port
Moresby is clearly a kind of heterosexual stand-in the homosexual Bowles and
Kit, another heterosexual version of the lesbian Jane. Perhaps the author,
writing in 1949, was simply trying to make his couple more palatable to the general
audience at a time hostile to LGBTQ identity (long before there were even such
a term). I feel he was also quite-reticent about his gay identity, particularly
in the US, while he felt freer to express it in Central America and Morocco,
despite consorting with major gay American and British figures—he was a music
student of Aaron Copland and became good friends with Gertrude Stein,
Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, while later drawing
nearly every gay writer and poet to his residence in Tangiers, including Allen
Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Even my Spanish book agent joked that when she
was young her mother would not allow her to visit the Bowles’ in Tangiers. My
former agent is now dead.
Perhaps his
fiction was simply a kind of fantasy to play out the difficulties of this
bi-sexual couple in a more simplistic context than their real lives allowed.
Yet, in the novel there are all sorts of hints that something else was going
on, while in Bertolucci’s film there are only a couple of occasions when the
screenwriters suggest there might be something more here, as when Kit (Debra
Winger), now attracted to their handsome traveling companion, George Tunner
(Campbell Scott), declares that it is not her problem as much
as it is her husband’s. Mostly, Bertolucci simply skips over any attempts at
explaining what these “travelers,” as opposed to “tourists” are truly seeking.
In
short, I now feel there was something inherently dishonest in Bowles’ original
work, which shows up in the Bertolucci film as a kind clumsy lie.
But
if you forget that there is anything even slightly autobiographical about this
work, or that an openly gay man is writing about the collapse of the
heterosexual romance, the movie actually works quite nicely. It is beautifully
filmed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (who won awards from BAFTA and The
New York Film Critics Circle), who, after introducing the credits in a
black-and-white paean to New York City—presumably to establish the period and
the characters’ roots—turns his lens to tawny browns and yellows to establish
the Moroccan and Algerian landscapes.
Moreover,
the music by Ryuichi Sakamoto, combining Arab calls to prayer, North African
music, and a lush Hollywood score, is equally memorable, winning him several
awards as well.
If
at first I was a bit disturbed by John Malkovich’s deadpan portrayal of Port, I
realized by film’s end that it was not, perhaps, so very different from the
kind of high-cultured disdain of Bowles himself, who narrates a few passages
(as an observing dinner guest in a hotel restaurant).
Winger as Kit is
a bit more problematic. In her perky, raspy-voiced characterization of Kit, she
doesn’t quite fit the superstitious and problematic figure who, on some days,
we are told, sees signs in everything about her, falling into bouts of
inexplicable fears and depression. In this version she seems far more hardy and
ready for battle than the character who Bowles describes needed Port to make
all decisions so that she might not be responsible for life. Here, she becomes
the far dominant figure, as Port moodily moves through the desert spaces,
particularly after he begins to suffer the signs of Typhoid Fever. She, in
fact, appears to be the far stronger individual in their relationship, and even
attempts to nurse her dying husband back to health.
In
her passivity at the end of the film, it is almost as if Kit were allowing into
her life all of the others whom Port (and she) had previously attempted to
escape from, including Tunner, whom Port plots to send off to other desert
frontier cities to keep him away from Kit, and the Lyles, the nasty British
travel guide writer and her monstrous adult baby, Eric (the always wonderful
Timothy Spall), who she keeps at her side by denying him money or any of his
adult desires for drink and, presumably, male companionship. He represents one
of the most notorious examples of a mamma’s boy outside of Whatever
Happened to Baby Jane? or Psycho.
Yet,
strangely, it is precisely these reprehensible people who this generally
incompatible couple need: if nothing else the Lyles bring some comic relief to
their unhappy lives, and Tunner provides (perhaps for both) some empty-headed
romance, as well as some financial stability that Port and Kit might seek,
particularly after being robbed of both billfold—although Port does retrieve
that—and his passport, which he refuses to retrieve in order to escape further
encounters with Tunner. One might almost argue, in the end, that the Moresbys'
problem is that despite their adventurous personalities, they won’t dare
themselves to hang out with all the wrong people, who could, in fact, bring
them closer to one another. They want to be travelers without a true
destination, making them, in fact, more tourists than the people whom they
describe, “when they arrive somewhere immediately want to go home.” Tunner,
indeed, in his attempt to reign in Kit’s almost mad wanderings, is perhaps more
of a true world traveler than Kit and Port were ever destined to be. In the
end, Kit simply disappears into thin air, while the handsome Tunner stands
still as a testament, if nothing else, of himself and his jaunty American-ness.
The reason The Sheltering Sky’s major characters both die and
disappear is the fact, perhaps, that they simply cannot put down real roots. The images
of Manhattan in the credits are all an illusion. They might have lived in that
city (actually for a brief period of time the Bowles resided in a Brooklyn
Heights house with other noted gays and open-minded artists W. H. Auden, Carson
McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, and Gypsy Rose Lee), but they
could never stay too long in one place, which is really what Bowles’ novel and
Bertolucci’s film is all about; endless traveling can ultimately look a lot
like tourism, and wise Americans such as they were can easily become ugly.
Los Angeles, July 1, 2018
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (July 2018).
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