The cage door was shut ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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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)