Call this the final post to purge my recent obsession with Bernardo Bertolucci‘s The Sheltering Sky. This is a film that got slammed pretty hard upon its 1990 release, and yet I find myself going back to it again and again. Pauline Kael once said that great films are rarely perfect ones. And that is certainly the case here. Take for instance, Bertolucci’s choice of injecting the author of the book, Paul Bowles as a cast member, and omnipotent narrator. Paul has a scene near the beginning of the film in which he offers voice-over to give some insight into the leading couple Port and Kit Moresby (John Malkovich and Debra Winger). This is quite redundant, because everything up to that point has been shown far more elegantly in a visual sense. Yet, Bowles craggy face (he was over 80 at the time, with his novel more than 40 years behind him) gives the picture a memorable jump. He has a great cinematic face captured in stillness (no lips moving) by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The film concludes with the below voice-over, somewhat of a summation of the human experience which reflects on Kit and Port’s travails over the course of the motion picture. Humbling may be the appropriate word to sum up The Sheltering Sky. Again, this voice-over is a redundant addition to the film; yet utterly encaptivating.

The Sheltering Sky is full of these strange things that happen unexpectedly, the plot is wildly unpredictable, and fluctuates between the extreme and the mundane. Things also have a cyclic structure, not the least of which is the docks and cafe that the film opens and closes at. In the end, the film is unique and unusual enough to warrant several viewings to take all it has to offer in, and is certainly not worthy of the dismissal it received at the time of its release.