They were silent, sterile stages for his characters and camera to wander within. Though he frequently set his films in the shadows of stirring vistas-craggy Mediterranean islands, candy-colored industrial wastelands, sandy Californian deserts-they seldom vibrated with anything more than conspicuous emptiness. I don’t just mean an eroticism of the flesh the novel demands an eroticism of place as well. Watching him unspool the terrible fates of Port and Kit Moresby (John Malkovich, Debra Winger), two wealthy Americans on holiday in Algeria, revealed that the essential ingredient to properly translating Bowles’ story and prose is an innate eroticism, something that while present in the text gets overshadowed by its penetrative explorations of upper-class ennui. But seeing Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 adaptation proved me wrong. After all, he’d largely made his reputation with films examining existentially anguished bourgeoisie vanishing-sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally-in strange, foreign environments. Reading Paul Bowles’ lyrically desolate novel The Sheltering Sky, the one filmmaker whose name kept coming to mind as the best possible adapter was Michelangelo Antonioni.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |