They seek the exotic, and they find it. Dazed by the brightness of the desert sun, seduced by the darkness of the labyrinth of the city’s streets, confronted by a society where every sensual excess is available more or less on demand, they lose their roots as housebroken Americans. They are intoxicated by freedom, but instead of liberating their creative juices so that they can write those novels that are penned up inside, they grow restless and dissatisfied - with themselves, with each other.
Port and Kit are obviously losing their moorings. Tunner is curious about the exact nature of their relationship - there are scenes subtly suggesting he may have an erotic curiosity about both of them - and concerned that they are losing their way. They fall in with the local expatriate community, particularly with the unspeakable Lyles, mother and son, who claim to be writing a travel book but seem more obsessed by their own Freudian tangles.
The city grows restrictive to the Moresbys. The desert beckons, and they are seduced by its purity, beauty and harshness, much as another traveler, T. E. Lawrence, once was. They venture out into its wildness. Port sickens and dies, and Kim is rescued - or so it seems at the time - by a passing Arab, who makes her his concubine. By now the sun is so hot, the light so harsh, the shadows so deep and the bizarre so real that Kit has hardly any hold left on reality.
This story sounds, in its outline, lurid and melodramatic enough to furnish almost any movie with a sufficiency of plot.
Indeed, the press releases for “The Sheltering Sky” promise something of the sort: “the intimate proximity of doomed lovers . . . the scale of their passion juxtaposed against the vastness of the Sahara Desert,” etc. But in another sense nothing of great importance happens in the plot of this story; all of the big changes take place in the minds of the characters.
It is my handicap, perhaps, that I’ve read Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky, which inspired this movie. It makes it difficult for me to see Bernardo Bertolucci’s film in a fresh light, to judge it on the basis of what it is, rather than what it is not.
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