Critics reviews

As you'd expect, it's a big, handsome film, rich and strange in psychological depths and eroticism. Malkovich and Winger play woundingly well.

Expectations for this international 138-minute epic could naturally be described as fairly high. All the more disappointing then that The Sheltering Sky turns out to be a shallow, confused, frankly boring piece of work. Beautifully photographed, of course, but boring nonetheless.

Filmed in arduous conditions in Algeria and Niger, the movie tries to be bookish and introspective yet full of vast landscapes. Despite the obvious commitment of Winger, who gives an intensely physical performance, it remains a rather soulless and aloof experience.

While it is a film full of mysteries, the central mystery for me is why Bertolucci made it. That mystery, alas, tends to supersede all the others... I don't mean to suggest that The Sheltering Sky is a movie devoid of serious meaning and interest. On the contrary, it's probably Bertolucci's most erotic and sensual movie since Last Tango in Paris, shot so gorgeously by Vittorio Storaro that it's worth seeing for its views of deserts, markets, and North African alleys alone.

It is not about travelers and doomed lovers and juxtapositions, that’s for sure. It is about educated, bookish, somewhat jaded American intellectuals being confronted by an immensity of experience that they cannot read or understand. Here is civilization up against the unanswerable indifference of nature.

To viewers unacquainted with the novel, the movie will probably come across as a slightly stiff drama between eccentric, vaguely estranged wayfarers Malkovich and Winger, which becomes increasingly better (and grimmer) as they travel deeper into the hostile desert... The point of the movie, now reduced to a bare, unrequited love story, with sand and flies, will seem elusive at best.

Bertolucci's work feels like a masturbatory intellectual exercise. The scenes are listless and dramatically inert. The flair for passionate staging and expressive camerawork seems to have left him. His psychological dynamism too... He doesn't penetrate Bowles's themes, he hollows them out. He gives them a tourist's treatment.

"The Sheltering Sky" is a long, beautifully modulated cry of despair. It's the sort of dark, romantic movie that only Mr. Bertolucci ("The Conformist," "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Last Emperor") could bring off without allowing audiences to wonder, even briefly, about the self-absorption of the characters.

The only thing director Bernardo Bertolucci... has gotten right is the atmosphere. Camera whiz Vittorio Storaro conjures up genuine drama out of sand, heat and pestilence, something Bertolucci and co-writer Mark Peploe fail to manage with the film’s three main characters as they set out for the desert.