MOVIES : Out From Under a Sheltering Sky : At 35, Debra Winger, moved by her role in the Bernardo Bertolucci film, sets out on a personal quest

The year-end films have divided both critics and audiences even more sharply than usual, none more so than Francis Coppola’s “The Godfather Part III.” Depending on where you sat, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film of the Paul Bowles novel “The Sheltering Sky” was either boring or brilliant but never so-so or mezzo-mezzo. It raised the question, raised previously about Antonioni’s “L’Avventura,” as to whether a film about bored and boring people can itself escape being boring. “L’Avventura” has now achieved classic status and I think it likely “The Sheltering Sky” will be around for a long time as well.

What few critics and fewer viewers have argued with is the power and artistry of Debra Winger’s intense and volatile performance as Kit Moresby, the American playwright who travels to North Africa with her composer husband, Port, in the late 1940s.

Winger, 35, whose vibrantly sensual roles in “Urban Cowboy,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Terms of Endearment” (as Shirley MacLaine’s doomed daughter) earned her star status, was rather reluctantly in Los Angeles for the local pre-Christmas premiere of “The Sheltering Sky.”

She is outspoken and, as was said of someone else years ago, does not mind calling a spade a dirty blanking shovel. Of living in Los Angeles, she says: “I can’t believe I stayed as long as I did. It’s very insidious, the lure.

“I came home from Africa. My dog of 15 years died and I nursed him through that. And when it was finished, it was just clear to me that it was time to go. And Noah (her 2 1/2-year-old son by Timothy Hutton, from whom she was lately divorced) and I gave away about 60% of our belongings and put the rest in storage, packed three bags and we’ve been traveling ever since. That’s about seven months now.”

Doing the film in North Africa was nothing like a job to be left behind on the stage each day at quitting time. It became a life-changing, soul-opening, vision-altering experience, as acting a role can sometimes be but is only rarely.

It was culture shock supreme, as she says--a middle-class woman from Cleveland experiencing North Africa from Tangier to the remote, sand-blown Saharan interior, and with Noah along. “I must have been suffering from temporary insanity when I thought I could do it,” Winger says. But she did and when shooting was over, she even spent a further week on caravan with the Taureg tribesmen who had been Kit Moresby’s captors in the tumultuous last sequences of the film. It was, she says, her way of putting the role behind her and experiencing the desert as her own person.

She identified with the Moresby woman but came to recognize a fundamental difference between them. “Kit was very neurotic and very much a victim of her omens and her signs and intuitions, but the same things that propel me forward in life paralyzed her with fear. You start running and you can’t really stop it. I mean, that’s what happens. It was all revealed to me in the desert, and all became clear that you can’t stop or you’ll never do anything.”

In Tangier, Winger became a close friend of author Paul Bowles, who appears briefly in the film. “His autobiography is called ‘Without Stopping,’ and I think that’s the essence of what he means to say. That, yes, there is an ultimate destiny. It’s all going to happen anyway. . . . But it doesn’t mean that you can’t wend your way there in the way you chose.”

Bowles flew to Paris (his first visit in 30 years) for the premiere there of “The Sheltering Sky.”

“He was blown out, and for Bernardo and me that was the biggest sigh of relief we had.”

Her co-star, John Malkovich, had deliberately had almost no contact with Bowles. He was playing a character close to Bowles’ spiritual alter ego and may have been avoiding confusing author and character. “He didn’t feel the need,” Winger says, “he didn’t feel it was right. But I dove into the opportunity to be with Paul.”

It became a platonic love affair. “I mean, what can happen between a woman in her 30s and an 80-year-old man? But then it happened. You look at someone and you fall in love. It was a mutual feeling.”

Bowles continues to write every day. “He keeps writing, but he said he felt that when Jane died (in the late ‘70s), there was no one left to read what he wrote. For a guy who writes so cold, who claims to be at arm’s distance from everything, those words tumble from his lips. My God, what a relationship.”

It was a remarkable posthumous tribute to his wife. “Also a great comment on marriage,” Winger adds. “Whatever their oddities were as human beings and however bohemian they were . . . well, let’s say we have to define marriage in our own terms each time. And that’s what ‘The Sheltering Sky’ tries to do. Port and Kit really tried to find the reality of their marriage, the true communication. And the tragedy is that it was too late, or there wasn’t enough time.”

Winger says friends who see the film are silent when they come out. Then they call her two or three days later. “Even though it’s beautiful and you get around to talking about the costumes and this and that, they want to talk about marriage, they want to talk about their marriage. They want to talk about what the film means, and what else is a film for than to stimulate that?”

On Friday, Harvard College is presenting an evening of Bowles’ music and Winger is going to Cambridge to intersperse the music with readings of his prose. “Paul loved the idea so I said I’d do it.” He will not attend, and, reading his short stories, she found a parable that may (rather ambiguously) explain his attachment to Tangier.

“This holy man takes a group of men to the seaside and shows them how turbulent the ocean is. He instructs them to take a bucket and walk into the sea and fill it with water. And it’s completely still. He asks them why it isn’t turbulent. And they say, ‘We’ve taken it from the place where it belongs.’ And he says, ‘That’s why I can never leave here.’ ”

She adds, “That’s what I’m doing--looking for that one place that will activate you, the only place where you can exist.”

It was a tough picture to do, and in one scene when she is being attacked in a marketplace (trying to use French francs which none of the natives recognize), the extras became over-enthusiastic and Bertolucci feared for her safety, although he prudently kept the cameras running.

“How could I know what was going to happen? It was translated into five tribal languages through five interpreters who spoke only French and the tribal language, then Bernardo said, ‘OK!’ At no moment was I sure I wouldn’t be hurt, but I somehow had a sense that my life wasn’t in danger.” Her scarf was being pulled tight enough to choke her and, she says, “there were some strange hands in different places.”

More difficult was a scene in which she and Port make love on a rocky cliff ledge, a crucial moment because it suggests the couple have rediscovered at least one way to communicate.

“Later when John and Bernardo were talking about the pain of the scene, they thought that when I joined in the conversation I was in touch with what they were in touch with. In fact, because I’d been flat on my back, I was the one who suffered physically. It was two more days before I felt the mental anguish of the scene,” she says, laughing, “after the bruises had somewhat started to heal. “

She is immensely proud of her work in the film. “For the first time in a long time--maybe since ‘Terms of Endearment’--I really feel that I’ve done it. I really did what was asked of me, and I’m proud of it. . . . The proof is there on celluloid and it’s a voyage for anyone who wants to take it.”

The strong identification with a part is not so unusual for her. “I seem to choose things that I’m exploding with at the moment, even if it doesn’t come out in the film as a big experience. . . . I can’t imagine doing a film for any other reason than an intuition that this is what I need at this moment in life.”

“The Sheltering Sky” was perfectly timed. “In some way it gave me the strength to cut off my life as it was, because I was living a lie. I was living here, a sort of easy life, but I wasn’t finding out very much. It was like a movie when you show a guy going in this beautiful door and then they cut to the interior. But really behind that door all there is is a couple of two by fours holding it up. I wanted to find out where the door actually led into the house.”

She loves acting, although she has also said it is occasionally an humiliation, and she finds dealing with the press, along with other aspects of the profession, humiliations as well. But she likes the honesty of the work.

“You can’t not be honest. You may not be telling the truth of what you wake and feel but for the time you’re doing the part what you’re doing is what you’re waking up and feeling--if you work that way. And that’s an incredible way to be completely secret and yet honest at the same time about a truth, a running truth.”

As actors, she and Malkovich work quite differently. She feels everything intensely. He is the crafty professional. “He likes to say these shocking things. He talks about how they have to wake him up right before his entrance on stage. He told me he loved being a runway model. He doesn’t prepare and he didn’t want to meet Paul. But all that’s required is respect for the other actor. That’s all that’s required. I had a deep respect for him and I felt respected by him, and that’s all that matters.”

She understands his delight in saying shocking things. “I’ve done that. I still do it. It’s fun. You want to perpetrate certain myths because it makes your life easier, and nobody wants to admit they’re normal.” She laughs. “The worst thing is to finally admit you’re normal and find out you’re not.”

The put-the-world-on outspokenness blends curiously well with a private candor. The Sahara experience did seem like the beginning of a questing voyage for her.

“It’s difficult in the ‘70s and ‘80s--with all kinds of mystical hocus-pocus--to remember that there is a real spiritual journey that has happened and will happen for all time. Trends come and go. But there is a real journey to be taken and, hopefully, your work can mesh with that.”

Then she looks at the huge tree in the courtyard of the Polo Lounge and exclaims how much young Noah would enjoy climbing it. A friend remarks that it is one of the oldest living things in Beverly Hills.

“No,” Debra Winger says, “I’ve seen a few women who might be good competition.”