The Sheltering Sky dvd movie.|
The Sheltering Sky buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
 |
List Price: $19.98 Our Price: $17.99 You Save: $1.99 Features • Anamorphic • Closed-captioned • Color • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 12 December, 1990 DVD Release : 03 September, 2002 |
| [ + Zoom ] [ Buy Now ] | DVD : Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
The Sheltering Sky description Master filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci applies his considerable talent to this haunting adaptation of the Paul Bowles novel. John Malkovich and Debra Winger play Port and Kit Moresby, characters loosely based on Bowles and his wife Jane, who flee New York for North Africa, where they hope to find mystical truths that will reignite the spark of their marriage. But instead they lose their moral bearings (with help from a friend, played by Campbell Scott, who has an affair with Kit) while traveling deeper and deeper into the Sahara. Before long, what started as a vacation at exotic lodgings has descended into a tour of hell, as they stumble farther and farther into an unknowable spiritual territory. Though long and at times slow-moving, the film features marvelously nuanced acting by Malkovich and Winger and visionary filmmaking that makes the landscape at once picturesque and threatening. --Marshall Fine |
|
|
| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Finding Meaning While Following the Lost |
| I couldn't find the edition I read of "The Sheltering Sky" here on [...] but my copy includes an introduction by Paul Bowles written a year or so before he died. In the introduction, he says "the less said about the film version, the better."
(His only other comment about the film was to mock the filmmakers for trying to make Debra Winger look like his wife Jane and sell the story as a thinly-veiled account of their trip into the Sahara...a trip that Bowles swears he never took with Jane). I'd seen the movie before reading the book and was intrigued with the story enough to read the novel. Then I watched the movie again. The film is certainly more interesting if you've read the book. That's probably because you can follow the inner thoughts and feelings (or lack of feelings) of the characters, something you'd only have to guess at while watching the film otherwise. It seemed to me that some really good dialogue was left out of the film between Port and Kit, especially in their final scenes. (That some of this dialogue was given to the author during his cameo at the beginning and end of the film didn't make it any easier either). I love John Malkovich but I think he's not really right for Port. Port comes across (to me) as a vain, handsome but empty man stubbornly trying to free himself from his privileged existence. Malkovich is too intense and interesting, too unpredictable to be a pretty boy foolishly blundering through the Sahara to shake himself off. He's a great actor but his talents obscures this character (again, my opinion). And I've really learned to appreciate Debra Winger. She really is one of this country's finest actresses, taking on some really tough roles and making them work. When she's left to carry the movie by herself, I wished there had been more scenes earlier to draw her character out more. Three years after this film, she was also great in "Shadowlands" with Anthony Hopkins. The brutality of the novel is downplayed when Kit wanders off to join a caravan late in the film. In the movie, she becomes involved with an Arab trader like a mini-romance where she eventually gives herself to him. In the novel, she's immediately passed between the two men leading the caravan and accepts her total loss of identity. I think you'll agree there's a huge difference between a romance and a rape, right? But the film follows the storyline somewhat faithfully and has some really wonderful photography of the Sahara Desert. I thought the ending was a little confusing...until I read the book and rewatched it. I'm sure the movie will be more interesting if you did that...I'm just not sure you'd want to invest that much time in it. I thought it was worth it. |
|
|