There are within the novel sections pleasantly evocative of contemporary Africa. However, these sections are not enough to redeem it from the angsty, inarticulate existentialist mess that it descends into. In short the novel collapses under the weight of its own pretension. Wisely, Bertolucci seems to play down the existentialist side of things, and to concentrate instead on the cinematic rendering of post-war Africa. Of course, as a medium film enjoys huge advantages over literature in this respect: film works through the senses, we `feel' them; the novel, on the other hand, is experienced intellectually, and is thus subject inevitably to the abstractions and distortions which mar the process of evocation. We really see these advantages in effect here: visually Bertolucci's film is nothing short of stunning.

Yet this is not enough somehow - having mostly removed the quasi-philosophical core of the novel, the film feels empty (witness the pointless stilted, expositional dialogue of the first 30 minutes, for example). This emptiness is not to be filled by pchycological character study or exiting plot shifts - both characters and plot are handles in the film as amatuerishly as they were in the book. Bertolucci undertakes to fill this emptiness, it seems, by reinventing the story as an `erotic-drama', to attempt to charge it with a fervidness that was (perhaps deliberately) only latent within the novel. The practical results of this are a couple of rather gratuitous shots of Debra Winger's bottom, and the scene featuring the Bedouin prostitute with gratuitously large breasts. Consequently the film is about as erotic as your average soft-core porno movie.

I have only recently finished reading The Sheltering Sky. I hated it. When I read the glowing, passionate reviews of pretty much every reviewer on Amazon, I thought I must have missed something, or completely misunderstood the book. Just to check, I got hold of the movie. To my tremendous relief, I now see I didn't (or, if I did, then so did Bertolucci): the film is pretty much exactly how I imagined it would be.

Malkovich nails the Port Moresby character (how odd, incidentally, to name your lead character after a place in Papua New Guinea). Port is what the Brits would describe in their inimitable way as a "complete wanker".

Debra Winger captures Kit Moresby's high-tensile stupidity perfectly. In her opening scene, she wigs out after roughly fifteen seconds of an innocuous conversation because she doesn't want Port to talk about a dream he has had, lest Tunner should repeat it back in New York. But then within twenty minutes, she's having sexual intercourse with Tunner behind Port's back, apparently without a second thought to the stir this might create back home should Tunner happen to mention it.

Port is no cuckold, though: Even before Kit's infidelity, he has, during the course of an evening stroll, wound up having it off with a Bedouin prostitute at the edge of town.

Thereafter, disaffection for the protagonists is total. It is impossible to care a fig whether either lives or dies, and the only value the film offers is the satisfaction of seeing that one of them does eventually die, together with a star comedy turn by Timothy Spall, Bertolucci's luscious cinematography, and a number of gratuitous shots of Debra Winger's nether regions.

None of which is reason enough to rent this for an evening, sad to say.

Olly Buxton