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FEATURE
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Above Bernardo Bertoluch brim his actors, Debra Winger and John Malkovlch, pictured left.
where I did something quite different. Port and Kit do something in that scene, when they try to make love, which they never do in the book. But I thought thatit was a way of conveying the painful emotion of their relationship at that moment, not through words, but through actions. In the book they say so many times how much they love each other, despite all the problems of being together, but in the film you have to show it.’
This was the major challenge faced by Bertolucci and his scriptwriter, the translation of - the inner thoughts of the self-absorbed characters into images and dramatic gestures. Debra Winger’s cerebral approach is seriously misjudged, but Malkovich’s intuitive acting style (‘I’m more likely to think about how somebody’d brush a fly away from his face than anything philosophical’), was spot on: ‘Mark Peploe and I felt that all the interior monologues - and all the kind of interior dialogues ,-where they think the opposite of what they say — had to be replaced by the actors’ physical presence. One has to feel what is happening to them through their skin,
through the language of the body, not through the
language of mind.’
Peploe likened this process to ‘turning a glove inside out’; it has not, however, revealed a silVer lining.
Bertolucci’s film seldom conveys the novel’s bleak nihilism: the atmosphere of dark perversity has been lightened, while the
cruel sexual assaults suffered by Kit when she later joins a Tuareg camel train were removed when Bertolucci discovered that their matriarchal culture contains no concept of rape. But even if one accepts the director’s anthropological rationale for removing these scenes, the substitution of an exotic sexual fantasy is a ludicrous corruption. Bertolucci’s reasons for changing the ending also lack substance: there is a world ofdifference between Kit’s total mental disintegration and the fudged, circular conclusion offered by the film: ‘I wanted Kit to be a bit catatonic, but I didn’t want to end in such a dark, negative way, because someone who has completely lost his identity very soon becomes uninteresting. That’s why scenes in asylums are often a bit boring, because you just see people shaking and repeating the same things. It is one of those areas where the convention and the reality are so close that they have become a cliche. So I wanted a more ambiguous ending, one which had what the French call, “the consolation of poetry.” ’
Poetic it may be, but this is small consolation for those ofus who imagined that Bertolucci, of all people, might do justice to the psychic pain and existential dread of Bowles’s brilliant source noveL The Sheltering Sky (18) opens on Friday 18 at Glasgow Odeon. Edinburgh (Mean and UCI, and Strathclyde UCI Clydebank.
The List 11— 24January 199113