Old habits die hard, though.
The strategy at once expands on the film's source, a short story by James Lasdun, and diminishes it. At the film's outset an African woman named Shandurai, played by Thandie Newton, flees her unnamed country after its military arrests her husband. She lands in Rome, where she enrolls in medical school, supporting herself by tidying up after an eccentric English musician who becomes intensely infatuated with her. Stunned that she's married, he momentarily backs off before embarking on an audacious scheme to prove his devotion. With but few modifications, Bertolucci, who wrote the screenplay, follows Lasdun's outline and often employs the writer's physical descriptions as stage direction.