The title Another Sky—the only film screenwriter and critic Gavin Lambert was to direct (he died in 2005 at the age of 80)—is a reference to his friend Paul Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky. Unfortunately, Paul Bowles and his crowd of homosexual aesthetes have pretty much gone out of style (Truman Capote excepted, but let's see how long that lasts). And Bertolucci's excruciating 1990 film adaptation of The Sheltering Sky can only further suppress interest in this alternate vision, at once more literal and less transparent, of being erotically enthralled and then swallowed whole by the North African desert.
With her wide mouth and downcast black eyes, Rose (Victoria Grayson, who had appeared the previous year in James Broughton's The Pleasure Garden) looks something like Jane Eyre as played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, and the two roles are not dissimilar. Another Sky takes place in the 1950s when, after serving as a nanny for various English families, Rose packs a suitcase—blouses with Peter Pan collars and a photo album featuring the bright faces of her former charges—and moves to Marrakech to work as a paid companion. Her employer Selena (Catherine Lacey) is a capricious lush, and when she's not enjoying the attentions of a younger Englishman and his American friend, she plays tour guide, offering up tips like "Arabs are so mysterious."
Say no more. Rose's distaste for Selena inflames her curiosity about Marrakech, and the camera follows her through the city as she claps her eyes on beggar boys and snake charmers, merchants and acrobats. She snaps pictures of street kids in exchange for a coin and a handshake, pasting the photographs into her album beside the faces she used to watch over. The black-and-white cinematography (by Walter Lassally) is efficient and attentive at first, like an ethnographic film or the alert tourist herself. But it soon loosens.
At a party hosted by the young American, who's wearing a fez and slobbering over a voluptuous blonde, Rose is entranced by an ensemble of Berber musicians. Her wide eyes glisten as Selena pretends to fall asleep, a cigarette hanging obnoxiously out of the corner of her mouth. When the band finishes, the host puts a Western dance record on, and the camera keeps returning to the performers' bare feet lined up at the edge of the floor, resting placidly even as dancers stomp nearby.
Rose gets the name of the handsome young oud player, Tayeb (played by a nonprofessional named Tayeb), and soon she's paying for the pleasure of his company, sneaking around Selena like—well, like a gay man first experiencing the intoxicating sexual marketplace of 1950s Tangier, as Lambert had. The film never completely convinces you that Rose—a repressed Englishwoman, not yet so old—would spend every last franc in her stolen purse to track a pretty boy to the edge of the Sahara. But that nagging incredulity only makes the cross-gender substitution more plain.
