THE SHELTERING SKY
A film review by Linh Tu
Copyright 1991 Linh Tu
Last night I rented the video version of the THE SHELTERING SKY by Bertolucci. On purpose, I waited until I finished reading the book before seeing the movie; and for myself, I can say that I liked it this way better. As someone has remarked, the book is hard to follow and to made sense of and I agree. The story justs wanders around aimlessly without any focal point; I admit that it was hard reading the book at times. However the movie, with its stunning visual scenes of the desert, made me understand for the first time, the existential malaise that the two main characters seem to possess. If I had not read the book, I would have had a hard times following the movie; the people just seem to wander from one place to another for no reason. For people who are afflicted with a quest for the "meaning of and to life", like myself, I would say that both the book and the movie are worth a shot. Every one will probably see different meanings into the story. For the general public, it probably will be boring.
In the movie version, the author (Peter Bowles) made several appearances where he commented on the motives of the main characters. And at the end of the movie, I guess he kind of lets us know his understanding of his own desert wanderings.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews