![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Its protagonists are a pair of aimless Western travelers - played by John Malkovich and Debra Winger and based on the author and his wife, Jane - who trek across Algeria, trying to reach out to each other and searching for some existential essence. ![]() Though the character relationships and the structure of the narrative remain unchanged, the meaning of the story has been altered - simplified yet made even less accessible, more stubbornly cloaked.Īt its essence, the film has something to do with loss of identity and sexual transformation, though what, specifically, is never fully clear. It can't be said that the director was overawed by his source material or that - even with the 79-year-old author functioning onscreen as a kind of narrator and presiding spirit - he has failed to make it his own. Unfortunately, the movie is just as difficult to get at but not nearly as alluring. In print, we're puzzled but fascinated by Bowles's inscrutability, by his subterranean style of inference and suggestion it's seductive, this harem dance. Neither can the Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci in his frustrating, monotonously obscure movie version. In telling his story, the author engages in a kind of literary dance of the seven veils he just can't seem to come across with it. In his 1949 novel "The Sheltering Sky," Paul Bowles devotes about as much energy to not saying what he means to say as he does to saying it. ![]()
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