There is a photograph Debra Winger keeps from the Sahara. She stands at the edge of the dunes in Tuareg robes, facing a void of untouched sand. Behind her, Bernardo Bertolucci is wrapped in a black leather Armani jacket and scarf, girding himself against infinity. The footprints and dolly tracks of a hundred-and-twenty-strong crew mark the last traces of civilisation. Beyond them: nothing. “I said, ‘I love it here. Whatever happens is OK. I love how small I am in the scheme of things,'” Winger recalled in a Golden Globes oral history. “He said, ‘That’s exactly why I hate this place.'” The photograph captures, in a single frame, the irreconcilable divide at the heart of The Sheltering Sky – and, thirty-five years on, at the heart of how the West still encounters the world beyond itself.
The Last Emperor’s Hangover
When Bertolucci brought The Sheltering Sky to the Paris Opera-Bastille for its gala premiere in November 1990, he was riding the nine-Oscar triumph of The Last Emperor. The expectation was another spectacle. Instead, he delivered a 138-minute meditation on boredom, colonial entitlement, and marital disintegration, set against the Sahara’s “ochre dunes kissing the salvific sky,” as the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro described his visual palette. The budget – $25 million, with six months of location shooting across Tangier, Ouarzazate, and the Algerian desert – made the film’s commercial failure catastrophic. It earned $2 million worldwide. Variety called it “narcissistic nihilism.” The New York Times branded it “a beautifully mounted slog.” Audiences recoiled.
Yet Bertolucci had intended precisely this discomfort. “After The Last Emperor, I was really interested in doing something that didn’t have a lot of actors and a lot of costumes,” he told reporters in 1990. Working from Paul Bowles’ 1949 novel – a book that had remained unfilmable for four decades – and a screenplay by Mark Peploe, Bertolucci set out to make what he called “a simple love story about two very complicated people.” The result was anything but simple. John Malkovich’s Port Moresby, a composer pursuing “authentic” sounds he neither understands nor respects, and Winger’s Kit, a fraying socialite seeking reconnection, arrive in 1947 North Africa clutching the debris of a decade-long marriage. Their journey, pitched as romantic salvage, reveals itself as a death march towards mutual oblivion.
Love Found on a Film About Love’s Failure
The supreme irony of The Sheltering Sky is that its production created one of cinema’s most enduring love stories. On set in Morocco, Malkovich met Nicoletta Peyran, a French assistant director. They have been partners ever since – never married, never needing to be. “It was just never a big deal. Never a goal of hers, never really a goal of mine,” Malkovich told GQ in February 2025, referring to Peyran as his wife. “And my first one didn’t work out so so well.” The couple have recently relocated to be near their granddaughter, a domestic settle-down that sits in almost comic contrast to the existential rootlessness Malkovich channelled as Port.
Malkovich’s memories of the shoot centre less on romance than on an encounter with the man whose words he was interpreting. “I asked Paul Bowles, ‘When did you realize that you weren’t going to live in America anymore and were going to stay in Morocco?'” Malkovich recounted in a 2023 interview. “He looked at me and he was just completely horrified because he had been in Morocco for over thirty years. He said he was still thinking about it.” The anecdote captures something essential about Bowles’ novel – its refusal of resolution, its suspicion that the self can never be fixed by geography.
Storaro’s Desert as Antagonist
The film’s enduring power resides largely in Storaro’s cinematography, which won the BAFTA for Best Cinematography. The Italian master, who had lit The Conformist in cold blues and Last Tango in Paris in warm oranges, conceived the Sahara as a metaphysical antagonist. His chiaroscuro bathes scenes in molten gold and cobalt. A sequence in which Kit wanders through a sandstorm – her silhouette dissolving into granular abstraction – rivals Tarkovsky’s Stalker for existential dread. “The sweat isn’t makeup; it’s real sweat,” Bertolucci admitted. “The dust is real dust, and the flies are real flies.” The crew battled desert heat and flash flooding caused by the first rains in the region in two years. Storms swept away roads and bridges, stranding equipment trucks and personnel alike.
Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score – recorded at Abbey Road Studios with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and released on Virgin Records – won the Golden Globe for Best Original Score, his second Bertolucci collaboration after The Last Emperor. Sakamoto, who died in March 2023, revisited the material decades later: his 2017 album async includes excerpts of Bowles’ text presented in several languages, a final meditation on the novel’s themes of time and impermanence. The score remains one of cinema’s most hauntingly melancholic soundscapes – aural proof that the desert is not empty but saturated with meaning the Moresbys cannot access.
A Prophecy of Wellness Tourism and Digital Nomadism
What critics dismissed in 1990 as pretentious art-house indulgence now reads as prophecy. Port’s declaration – “We’re not tourists. We’re travellers” – is the founding manifesto of a movement that would not coalesce for another three decades. Their quest for “authentic” experience – sampling local chants Port neither understands nor respects, dismissing guides as “colourful,” reducing Bedouin rituals to aesthetic curiosities – anticipated the entire apparatus of contemporary wellness tourism.
A 2025 paper presented at the EASA conference by anthropologist Fabiola Mancinelli of the Universitat de Barcelona situates digital nomadism within postcolonial theory, arguing that these “neoliberal subjects deploy individualised exit strategies – such as geographic arbitrage and outsourced labour – to navigate crises in affluent industrialised countries, while relying on global inequalities rooted in colonial histories.” In 1990, Bertolucci staged precisely this dynamic without the academic vocabulary to name it. The Moresbys are the original digital nomads – minus the Wi-Fi, plus a faster route to oblivion.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in May 2025, posed the question that still haunts the film: why did Bertolucci make it? “I wanted my next film to be one with no immediate political or historical implications,” Bertolucci claimed in the press materials. Rosenbaum found this astonishing. “The possibility of having ‘no immediate political or historical implications’ is now just about nil,” he wrote. The film depicts the Arab world as “wholly exotic and inscrutable” – a choice that mirrors the very colonial gaze it purports to critique.
The Colonial Gaze Question
This is the film’s most uncomfortable legacy. Academic scrutiny has sharpened over the decades. Elisabetta Tesser, in the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (2010), analysed the Moresbys’ transformation from tourists to travellers as a “pilgrimage in search of authenticity” that ultimately exposes the impossibility of the quest. The Orientalist discourse embedded in both Bowles’ novel and Bertolucci’s adaptation – the local people reduced to minor characters, “often unkind, inscrutable, or merely tools to advance the Western protagonists’ story” – has drawn particular censure. Writer Lijia Zhang, reflecting on a rereading in December 2024, captured the dilemma: “The local people in Bowles’ narrative are reduced to minor characters – often unkind, inscrutable, or merely tools to advance the Western protagonists’ story. Their voices are absent, their feelings left unspoken, as though they exist only as part of the landscape: exotic, unknowable, other. I cannot help but notice the colonial gaze.”
Yet the film’s refusal to redeem its protagonists constitutes its own form of honesty. Unlike Out of Africa‘s lush humanism, The Sheltering Sky offers no growth, only erosion. Kit’s final absorption into a nomadic tribe – her “assimilation” through a forced marriage to a tribal leader – hints at Algeria’s impending war for independence without sentimentalising it. “Bertolucci paints the Sahara not as exotic backdrop but as a patient predator, digesting invaders,” the critic J. Hoberman observed. The film’s power lies not in its resolution of the colonial question but in its exposure of its own complicity – a discomfort that grows more acute with each viewing.
Reassessment and Legacy
Time has burnished the film’s reputation. A 2023 BFI poll ranked it among the 100 greatest non-English films. The Arrow Films Blu-ray release, complete with a new video essay by David Cairns and Fiona Watson and a new interview with art director Andrew Sanders, has introduced the film to a new generation. It remains available to stream on BFI Player and Arrow, its visual opulence undimmed by the intervening decades.
The film’s influence ripples through works like Nomadland – Chloé Zhao’s portrait of American itinerants whose rootlessness mirrors the Moresbys’ in register if not in destination – and TÁR, where Cate Blanchett’s maestro disintegrates amid a different kind of cultural reckoning. The Police’s “Tea in the Sahara,” Sting’s 1983 song inspired by a chapter in Bowles’ novel, remains one of the band’s most haunting compositions. “I read it long before it was a film,” Sting told an interviewer. “It’s one of the most beautiful, sustained, poetic novels I’ve ever read.” In 2025, the Arch Stanton Quartet, a jazz group, announced a series of performances featuring readings from The Sheltering Sky coupled with reinterpretations of Bowles’ musical compositions – the novel continuing to generate new art three-quarters of a century after its publication.
What shifted in the reassessment? The post-9/11 disillusionment and the rise of “dark tourism” made Port and Kit’s quest eerily relatable. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a crisis of Western escapism: the digital nomad movement, the wellness pilgrimage to Peru or Bali, the curated Instagram adventure – all are expressions of the same fantasy Bertolucci anatomised. “Kit wasn’t just lost in Africa,” Winger observed in 2020. “She was lost in the twentieth century.” In the twenty-first, she is still lost. We are all still lost. The sheltering sky offers no shelter at all.
