SHELTERING SKY

United Kingdom, Italy 1990 - 35mm - 138 minutes, in English, French and Arabic with English subtitles

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Screenplay: Mark Peploe, Bernardo Bertolucci

Producer: Jeremy Thomas

Cast: Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott

Print Courtesy: Warner Brothers

Thursday, July 14 6:30 P.M. | WOH

Saturday, July 16 3:30 P.M. | WOH

Debra Winger and John Malkovich star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s sweeping, majestic film, based on the celebrated Paul Bowles novel. Working with his great cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci takes us into the Sahara post-WWII with Kit (Winger), Port (Malkovich) and Tunner (Campbell Scott). They see themselves not as tourists, but as travelers, as Kit says. What are they seeking in their travels? That may be as much a mystery to them as to anyone else, though the Sahara’s dazzling beauty may be a limited form of an answer. “Bernardo Bertolucci’s SHELTERING SKY is about sliding over the edge into oblivion, but going in style…. Bertolucci’s most seductive, most hypnotic movie…. The Sahara is a magnificent metaphor for a universe that is overwhelming in its vastness and complexity, but also as simple and finite as a grain of sand…. Mr. Malkovich and Miss Winger are extraordinarily fine as the lovers, each being just idiosyncratic enough to take the curse off the exoticism in which the movie is awash…. THE SHELTERING SKY is stunning to look at, but it is never simply picturesque. It mesmerizes”—Vincent Canby, New York Times. —Ken Eisen