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camera's 'symbiotic fusion' with the camels is shared by them. Viewers are also closely
aligned with Kit during the journey through repeated POV shots, and share her sense of
abandon, becoming oblivious to the cultural world to which she belongs.
Femininity and the destiny of female fulfilment
To portray Kit's devastation at Port's death, especially after having reached a mutual
understanding, Debra Winger portrays the character extremely passively - she never really
speaks - to convey estrangement from her past life. Her intense sexual relationship with
Belquassim is linked to the issue of identity, as its origins can be found in a concept that
Bertolucci explored in Last Tango in Pans, with the addition that here the use of verbal
language is erased altogether. By having Kit and Belquassim re-enact the sexual experience
of Paul and Jeanne who also met in seclusion, ignorant of each other's identity, Bertolucci
confirms his idea that only the annulment of memory, and consequently of one's own
identity, can temporarily allow a fusion with the Other and a free joyful sexuality. Like Paul
in the Paris apartment. Kit finds in this sensual seclusion a sort of limbo in which pressing
questions disappear. Between the two films there is also some similarity in the mise-en-scene;
Kit stands half undressed in a washtub while Belquassim playfully washes black paint off
her, and this is reminiscent of Jeanne being sponged down by Paul.
Nonetheless Kit's destiny is almost as sad as Port's, given that she must live with the
impossibility of being happy. Kit rejects traditional concepts of matrimony, with its
established passive female roles that lead to psychological frustration, a mode of being that
also affects long term sensual gratification. She also refuses more modern, pragmatic ways of
conducting relationships as typified by Tunner's perspective, because she knows the
limitations of living purely for the moment. The pessimism implied by her situation emerges
in Kit's admission that she is lost; it is an open ending that will find an attempted solution in
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