This film is about American artists Porte and Kate Moresby (John Malkovich and Debra Winger). The pair began a perfect experience in their lives as they looked for new experiences that could change the course of their lives and their relationship. Now, both seem to be drifting into the void in North Africa after the war in a short while.
Bertolucci's grand desert epic gets stuck in the sand right at the start.
Chicago Sun-Times
January 01, 2000
The book is so complete, so deep and so self-contained that it shuts the movie out. Bertolucci shows us the outsides and the surfaces, and a person seeing this movie without having read the book might ask what it is about.
Brimming with obscure meaning and devoid of drive and fervor, the film dries up in that symbolic desert sun, the victim of its own pretensions and a casualty of trying to film something best suited to the realm of cult literature.
Soul searching is rarely a thrill a minute but it's rarely as tedious as this. ...Oscar-bait it may be, but "The Sheltering Sky" is more deserving of the First Annual Chicken Little Award.
