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Stealing Beauty, where Kit's implied perspectives re-surface and are developed through
characters - Lucy and Miranda - who are no longer afraid of declaring that their
independence does not contradict their need for romance. Therefore, in The Sheltering Sky,
although Kit's doubts and disorientation are mainly conveyed through mute expressivity, her
destiny has an intellectual resonance that will induce reflection among viewers - not just
female spectators - who are sensitive to the difficulties of women attaining self-realization in
modern society, regardless of the laws and cultures in a given social order.
La mode retro as the film's contextual frame
In his analysis of cinema's use of metaframes which form a style or structure within which a
film's action is embedded, Grodal asserts that 'the addresser establishes a complicity of
fascinations between himself and the spectator", the result being that 'the freedom and
subjectivity of the viewer is moved from the level of fictional simulation of action to the level
of perceptual and affective simulation' (Grodal, 1997: 229). He identifies in nostalgia and
retro films the use of 'history and historical pattern as an embedded space for negotiating
social roles and common denominators'; he differentiates the two film types by asserting that
nostalgia films presuppose a mental model 'analogous to those used for memories', while 'la
mode retro is a more self-conscious version of the nostalgia film\ in that 'the self-referential
film highlights the fact that experience is a patterned social construction' (Grodal, 1997:
230). More specifically, in the retro film, the double position of the viewer's reception
situation is produced by the fact that:
The retro film makes the coded character of systems of consciousness and pleasure explicit [...] so that
present-day viewers know that other viewers also participate in their blend of nostalgic affect and
distance, and therefore viewers share not only identification with the fiction but also the voyeuristic
viewer-persona (Grodal 1997: 230).
The connotation of The Sheltering Sky as a retro film centres on the fact that the film embeds
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