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 11 I published several small pieces by Paul Bowles as part of his "Points in Time."
Perhaps I should add that in Sun & Moon 11 I published several small pieces by Paul Bowles as part of his "Points in Time."
I knew something of the lives of the
author and his amazingly talented wife, Jane, but I had not yet read all of
their works nor quite perceived the extent of their open bisexuality.
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.
Only after his death does she fall again
into near passivity, flagging down a local Bedouin group, whose leader takes
her on by dressing her up like a boy (another almost unobtrusive reference to Jane’s
identity) so that he might sexually assault her. What is interesting about
Bertolucci’s portrait of Bedouin life is that it is the men who wear the
burkas, while the women openly expose their faces.
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.
Perhaps the reason The Sheltering Sky’s major characters both die and disappear is the
fact 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 they 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 are 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
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