Tragedy Is Their Destination

By RICHARD CORLISS

Ever since its publication in 1949, Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky has been praised for its portrayal of a modern married couple afflicted with ennui, malaise, anomie -- the chic social diseases that Americans of the postwar era picked up from French intellectuals. But the novel has another ghoulish attraction: it maps out the all-time nightmare itinerary for the innocent abroad.

Port Moresby (John Malkovich), the protagonist of Bowles' story and of the swank, sexy, bleak and very beautiful film that Bernardo Bertolucci has made from it, is traveling with his wife Kit (Debra Winger) and an upper-class twit of a friend (Campbell Scott). He lands in Algeria, a hot, arid country where each hotel is more primitive than the last and the transportation, when there is any, is mostly by truck and camel. There are pestilential insects everywhere; the breakfast tray comes with a DDT spray can. When Kit isn't complaining about the heat or the stupidity, she is sleeping with the twit. A local prostitute tries to steal Port's wallet, and a loathsome Englishman filches his passport. What other atrocities can he imagine? Perhaps that he will sweat out a typhoid fever in a miserable cell in a Foreign Legion garrison? Or that his wife will lose her wits as the love slave of the sheik of Araby?

Bowles made this caravan of horrors persuasive by suggesting that tragedy was the destination his travelers sought. His prose got under the skin of . hapless Port and Kit and revealed their itch for romantic catastrophe. But movies are as different from novels as show is from tell. The director who would adapt this treacherous tale must find resources other than interior monologues and wan philosophizing. Bertolucci knew this when, after conquering China and Hollywood with The Last Emperor, he and co-screenwriter Mark Peploe approached The Sheltering Sky. "Instead of using language and psychology, I wanted to be more physical," he says. "I wanted you to feel the smells, the heat, even the cold -- suddenly you see snow on the tops of the camels. And in this film, the body language is more eloquent. There is very little profound dialogue, thank God!"

Toward the end of the movie's two hours and 17 minutes, there is very little dialogue at all; half an hour passes with hardly a word spoken except in Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg nomads, with whom Kit hitches a fateful ride. But there are many profound images of the desert in all its pitiless grandeur, courtesy of Bertolucci and his peerless cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. The wind sculpts mountains and minarets out of the shifting sand. On a rocky spot where Port and Kit have just made desperate love, the setting sun alights for a moment as if in benediction.

These panoramic vistas are no mere window dressing; they serve as counterpoint and antagonist to the Moresbys. Kit, always fighting the elements, will be blown away by them. Port, like so many Bertolucci heroes a passive creature whose bravado consists in allowing chance to work its will on him, at first believes he will enjoy feeling stranger in a strange land. North Africa, he thinks, will offer escape into adventure, exotic peril, the seductions of oblivion. He is wrong. The desert demands his surrender. The sand is quicksand; it will swallow him whole.

The fraternal twin to Sky in the Bertolucci canon is Last Tango in Paris, his taboo-trashing melodrama about a displaced American (Marlon Brando) who provokes a torrid, cloistered affair with a young Frenchwoman. But the new movie is not about sex -- or even, Bertolucci says, "the impossibility of love. It is about the impossibility of being happy within love. Kit and Port don't realize that the modern couple is an endangered species. Couples are so attacked by the outside world that they create a kind of fusion, a symbiosis. And that takes them, eventually, to a crisis. They look at each other and say, 'Who am I? Who are you?' "

Some viewers, who believe movies should be easy and edifying, will say of Kit and Port: Such small people. But nearly all of Bertolucci's films, from Before the Revolution to The Conformist, from 1900 to The Last Emperor, are big canvases holding tiny, forlorn souls. Because of the performers' power, the Moresbys come alive onscreen as they never quite did in the book. Bertolucci looks at Malkovich, the lizardly eminence of Dangerous Liaisons, and thinks of Brando: "They are two monoliths, unchanging, absolutely still -- and, from the first moment, condemned." Winger, for too many years the great unused actress of American film, is the perfect vessel for a woman who must be a piece of baggage on Port's existential tour, then a Florence of Arabia ministering to his illness, then the trophy of an alien prince. "You can always hear the click of Debra's mind," Bertolucci says admiringly.

The horror of Sky is that at the end, you can see Kit's mind click off. The beauty of the film is that it ultimately locates a married couple's humanity in that horror.