Herein you will find a lot of the Angst and ennui and other European concepts associated with the old-style European art film. These properties may come as a revelation and a provocation to some. To any, however, who know Bernardo Bertolucci as the director not just of The Last Emperor but of Before the Revolution and The Conformist too, the chief characteristic of the movie, far from any forbidding slowness or inertness, is likely to be its agreeable old-fashionedness. This is a cast of mind into which the spectator is ushered immediately by the scratchy black-and-white stock footage of New York City post-World War II, Lindy's, the Automat, and so on. From there, it's straight on to the blinding whiteness of northern Africa, in the company of three American tourists -- well, one tourist actually and two self-declared "travellers," a troubled married couple (he's a declining young composer, she's an idle playwright) whose adventuresomeness isn't matched by their travelling companion. The briefest synopsis of subsequent events would put to rout any notion that the Paul Bowles novel on which it's based -- never mind how much was lost in translation -- is simply inaccessible to the camera. There's no lack of incident and no lack of forward movement, and there is a vividness in the depictions of these sufficiencies that fulfills one of the highest potentials of the art of narrative: a sense of shared experience, shared fate. With Debra Winger, John Malkovich, and Campbell Scott. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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