The cage door was shut ?

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9 October (seen at Cineworld, Cambridge)

I suppose it is honesty, but what documentary about a writer, predicated on one of the last interviews in his life, is left ending with this exchange :

What do you think of the universe ?

What a ridiculous question !


The question came hard on the heels of ones that established that life after death or reincarnation are what Paul Bowles, the subject of The Cage Door is Always Open (2012), called ‘intellectual toys’. This phrase was not picked up on, whereas some might see such beliefs as superstitions and not intellectual at all – again, Bowles is allowed to say something and not be challenged on it, just as, if Daniel Young meant anything by his universe question, he might at least have defended it.

So far so good. Each of the three sections is prefaced by a shot of a page from Bowles’ most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, in each case a division of the book with a quotation. The quotation and / or the name of each section might mean something to Young in organizing his material, but I was left not understanding his taxonomy, nor why he includes animations that are not unlike Gilliam’s style and encompassing (it seemed) elements of Bowles’ life, but rushes them past the eye so that the experience is largely subliminal.

In interview, Bernardo Bertolucci calls The Sheltering Sky a poem in prose, each page filled with the venom of Bowles, which he wanted to distil into the film, but he was keen to stress that it is ‘not a psychological film, not a pyschological novel’ : They go into the desert and disappear for ever, these were his words.

Other figures such as Truman Capote, though there is no one like him for his bitchiness (or the huge cat that roamed his lap), gave the information about Bowles’ life, marriage, sexuality, writing and drug-taking, but, as said, arranged under the headings of his most famous book (including a quotation from Kafka), in a way that seemed largely arbitrary.

The documentary seemed to have been a long time in the making since Bowles’ death in 1999, when we were told that the impetus to make it had been reading The Sheltering Sky, contacting Bowles, and being offered the interview with which this review began. What is clear is that the writers of The Beat Generation flocked to him, for some of the same reasons that made him like North Africa, but he had been there first, and they learnt from him. Whether the film conveys much sense of Bowles’ literary legacy is open to discussion.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Just sheltering ?

This is a review of The Sheltering Sky (1990)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 August

This is a review of The Sheltering Sky (1990) in a 70mm print

* Contains spoilers *

Magnificent 70mm The Sheltering Sky (1990) at @CamPicturehouse : brilliant conception, luminous photography, attuned music, JM & DW superb.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 26, 2013

Not least through the experience of being seen in 70mm, with JM being Malkovich, DW Winger, and co-written and directed by Bertolucci.


Another in the Festival Central audience (and from the team at TAKE ONE) gave us:

Plenty to ponder about The Sheltering Sky: gloriously beautiful (and a great 70mm print), occasionally impenetrable, fascinating yet remote.
— Gavin Midgley (@GavinMidgley) August 26, 2013

I am unsure where the impenetrability crept in (if that is what impenetrability does, rather than suddenly shutting the door - or window), but, because I did not experience it, I would be de facto.

I also did not find myself at a remove, that anything was remote : unlike the fascination of, say, the very different Only God Forgives (2013), which comes from the other side of something much more substantial than a bamboo curtain.


Moving on, though in a sense not, there is a strong feeling of Pirandello at a crucial moment, where much more unravels that has gone before - I am thinking, needless to say, of Six Characters, as his best-known work (drama or otherwise) in the UK. Suddenly, the sporadic narrator, who seemed located when first we heard his voice, has a significance that we failed to grasp.

Does everything dissolve back to the point where we have nothing ? No, I still do not think so, hours later, though it might be worth at the original novel by Paul Bowles - I cannot see myself doing more than flicking through to have a feel for the narrative effect. I am left more with a feeling of benevolence, not that what I have engaged with has been insubstantial, the stuff of dreams.

That said, I do believe that there is a point, when Kit (Winger) leaves Port(er) (Malkovich) - and we have been greeted with a shot from then at the start of the film, after some sort of establishing of era and class has been effected by stock footage - and goes off with her little case, where the status of what we then see divides / departs from 'reality'. After all, it does not seem very likely that she would simply abandon him, and what she does is hardly the best way to cope with her position.

The scene in the market, where the flies are back*, the people, into whom or whose culture she has scarcely integrated, throng around her - this becomes the stuff of nightmare from which she wishes, unlike Joyce's Stephen, to escape into her own history.

Probably as long as we will ever know, we have had emperors dreaming that they were butterflies who might be dreaming the emperors, the King in Alice who is dreaming her, and Borges conjuring up a man who does conjuring himself only to find that he is another's creation. At the level of the narrative, Bertolucci's film gives us Port seeming to flee himself (or, at any rate, Tunner**) to take Kit to 'the pass', the view from which explains the title : he describes how it seems to protect, as if like a mantle, whereas she wants to know from what, and what is beyond.

On their initial arrival in the port town, Kit storms off at Port persisting in telling his dream to Tunner. This is where the occasional narration, and the appearance of the narrator, begin. However, beforehand, Port gestures at a white car arriving outside, and says to Tunner that Kit cannot have the white car just be a white car, but it has to mean something - which, in the film that follows, it does.

That impulse as describes by Port to Tunner is there again in Kit's unsettled response to being told about the sky (a half-empty one, not a half-full one), and the anxiety, the jealousy, the guilt surface as they are making love at that spot, and then deny them of a climax, whereas we most want that they should give themselves to each other and shakes off negative impulses. It becomes another such impulse in its own right.


And, finally, Port's sickness, which draws Kit to him : is it, in any sense, real or is it symbolic ? Does it represent the decay of their relationship (Port has been off for the night***, and she has woken from the train journey to find Tunner), which only, when Kit is properly afraid of losing Port, brings her back to him, and is there not quite a strong feel of, for example, Truffaut in Jules et Jim (1962) ?

If seeking to join a camel-train does not also operate on the level of some sort of psychological coping-mechanism, some projection of the self out of the situation into the fantasy of becoming an Arabic man's wife (or mistress), I am misreading this film and what I see it suggesting about these characters.

I do not think so, for, as with that scene on the edge of the cliff, the scenery - shot with real flair and a sense of grandeur by Vittorio Storaro) - feels there not merely for the purpose of telling a story, but is the story, or in inseparable from the story, or the story from it. The grotesqueries of travelling companions (includingly the lovingly obnoxious Timothy Spall), the purgatorial conditions, all of these things operate multiply, and make that quick flick through Bowles' original seem more likely...



End-notes

* Were we, at some level, reminded of the Biblical plague of flies (and / or of such tones in Days of Heaven (1978)) ? Do the weevils in the flour with which the soup has been made likewise say something to us ? (Port and Kit play oblivious to them just to banish Tunner, with his incessant spraying !)

** Played by Campbell Scott, he is George Tunner, irritating, ingratiating, even seductive (but kept at arm's length by his surname ?). He could be all men / suitors / rivals - or none, and just a cipher.

*** Self-destructively, he is not content just to get away with his wallet, but has to show that he has done so.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)