The Sheltering Sky (Il té nel deserto, 1990) The Poet of Light - The lights and colours of Vittorio Storaro

The return of a successful double-act: Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro. The year is 1947. The tumult of New York catching its breath after the trauma of worldwide destruction. Our heroes - the composer, his successful novel writer and their friend, set sail all the same. What moves the couple away from New York and what draws them to the desert? There is a range of different possible interpretations. To bring their relationship back to life? A thirst for adventure? Or some kind of... Robinson Crusoe trip, a break from well-oiled mechanisms of civilisation? An escape from routine? Well, let's talk about it. Because the micro-dramas between the characters are vital to the plot. They are surrounded by a foreign culture, something wild, but it's as though our heroes had always been moving around in an unknown world and their own strange bubble. And their games.
Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio Storaro are an inseparable pair - so we really should mention the work of Storaro. He had already shown on a few occasions an ability to create unified pictorial epics from barely compatible images, but here he does something completely different. The warm, dusty colours of the The Sheltering Sky glitter on the screen. Yet there's even more to it than that - Storaro's composition even influences how high the sun rises in individual scenes. This is significant, as the cinematographer builds largely on natural images in this film. The spectacles contained within The Sheltering Sky also reflect human conditions. The heat, the dust, and the changes in the light mirror the emotional state of our heroes. Or is it the other way around?