The slow and hesitant “On the Hill” overflows with a sense of despair and anguish, and slowly grows to incorporate Arabic vocals into the strings as it develops this sense of haunting isolation and loneliness continues on in the subsequent “Dying”. For example, the quite stark and disquieting “Belly” adds woodwinds to the tonal palette, while in “On the Bed (Dream),” the theme is twisted and tortured and layered amid a series of eerie string figures. It receives noteworthy restatements in several subsequent cues, but what’s clever is that Sakamoto often finds interesting ways to subtly change them to convey different thoughts and emotions. The Sheltering Sky theme forms the cornerstone of most of the score. The layers of sound that Sakamoto builds up are at times quite overwhelming, with the entire string section climbing to at times quite huge proportions.

The theme is certainly beautiful, speaking to the spectacular desert vistas of the Sahara, but has a significant amount of tragedy to it too, with a weeping, cascading effect running through it all, lamenting for Kit and Port’s doomed relationship. After a brief, scene-setting muezzin-like chant in Arabic – “The Sacred Koran” – Sakamoto unleashes his main theme: and what a theme it is! “The Sheltering Sky Theme” is a sweeping, emotional piece for a massive bank of strings, accompanied by the subtlest amount of electronic percussion. Sakamoto won an Oscar in 1987 for Bertolucci’s previous film, The Last Emperor, and despite having the pressure of trying to emulate hat score’s success, Sakamoto made The Sheltering Sky a worthy follow-up. One of the more universally acclaimed aspects of the film is its score, by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. The novel is one of the most acclaimed works of the twentieth century, and has been described by many commentators as one of the most compelling explorations of alienation and existential despair ever written, but the film was less successful although praised for its visual magnificence, some critics called it “insufferably dull,” and a film which “dries up in that symbolic desert sun, the victim of its own pretensions” that “gets stuck in the sand right at the start.” However, the harshness of the Saharan environment, coupled with Port’s jealousy and his suspicions that Kit is having an affair with their friend and travelling companion George Tunner (Campbell Scott), only makes things worse, leading to tragedy, death, and madness. It stars Debra Winger and John Malkovich as married American couple Kit and Port Moresby, who arrive in Algeria in 1949 on a holiday which they hope will rekindle their failing marriage. The Sheltering Sky is an epic romantic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, based on the 1949 novel of the same name by Paul Bowles.

The sheltering sky novel