The sheltering sky

‘The sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.’

Many people have received the first impression of Morocco through cinema or literature, and that contact has left a mark in the form of attraction and curiosity that finally brings them to verify what it feels like stepping on this land and climbing the dunes, savoring tea and smelling the roses... For many European and American travelers, that first impression came through Bernardo Bertolucci's film "The sheltering sky".

Althought the original story does not take place in Morocco, the film photographed by Vittorio Storaro was filmed in Tangier, Ouarzazate, Aït Ben Haddou, Erfoud, the Atlas, and other locations in Algeria and Niger.

All the cliches of the risky trips to an exotic continent are present: the irrational fear of diseases of the traveler and scams by opportunistic rogues, the prejudices of colonialism and reciprocal racism (manifest or undercover), the discomforts and the gap between the plans and the inevitable improvisation.

'A tourist is the one who thinks about returning home from the moment of his arrival... while a traveler can never return.'

Kit (Debra Winger) & Port Moresby (John Malkovich)

“It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life; she knew that, and she also knew that he loved them more if she could be there to experience them with him. And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that. It was as if always he held the fresh hope that she, too, would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things.”

Paul Bowles - The sheltering sky

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Based on Paul Bowles's great novel that masterfully dives into human alienation and existential despair, the film is visually captivating although some critics described it as pretentious and boring, and the writer forsook the adaptation.... despite his brief appearance playing himself in the rol of the narrator.

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“The desert landscape is always at its best in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The sense of distance lacks: a ridge nearby can be a far-off mountain range, each small detail can take on the importance of a major variant on the countryside's repetitious theme. The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day had fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again: the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time.”

Paul Bowles - The sheltering sky

Kit Moresby (Debra Winger)

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As a very personal impression, the unforgettable phrase from the movie script, that curiously does not appear in the novel: in Port's feverish dream, in the middle of the trance ceremony, a "Berber" warns him:

'Put your illness for sale or you will not find a buyer, you will not save yourself'

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