The Sheltering SkyJohn Malkovich and Debra Winger are Port and Kit Moresby, a wealthy American couple who leave the certainty and structure of their married life in New York for an extended sojourn in North Africa. They are "travellers", not "tourists", they clarify for the benefit of their tag-along acquaintance, Tunner (Campbell Scott).
Loosened from the moorings of their lives in the city, they each struggle to recapture something essential in their nature to bridge the estrangement that has crept into their ten year union. Setting out on a journey through unmapped existential as well as more literal territory, they by turns embrace and resist their cultural dislocation while desperately trying to draw nearer to one another.
Based on the cult 1949 novel by Paul Bowles, Bertolucci's viscerally charged adaptation makes stunning use of desert locations and Vittorio Storaro's simply sublime cinematography. Ryuichi Sakamoto's elegiac score also adds immeasurably to the film's atmosphere.
New 35mm print.
"A big, handsome film, rich and strange in psychological depths and eroticism" - Time Out
