A slippery self-portrait of the artist-as-explorer, Bernardo Bertolucci's epic The Sheltering Sky (an adaptation of the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles) serves as the second chapter of his self-described "Orientalist Trilogy." Two Americans—Port, a composer (John Malkovich) and Kit, a playwright (Debra Winger)—arrive in French Algeria, seeking inspiration by means of exotic thrills. A desire to disappear into the unknown only pulls the pair further apart and deeper into the Sahara. Bertolucci juxtaposes these existential quandaries with the couple's refusal to see how their wandering is protected by hotels, servants, armies, embassies and whiteness itself. As proof of Bertolucci's belief that cinema should chiefly be about cinema, the film contends with the works of his forefathers (Godard's Contempt, Hawks' Hatari!, Renoir's The River, Antonioni's The Passenger, the oeuvres of Pasolini and Fellini) and their respective fantasies of love, freedom, and the Orient, just as Kit steps out of the shadow of her paternalistic husband and into her own troubled independence. – Kelley Dong