Silk is the latest casualty in a line of films with a David Lean glint in their eye that aspire to elevated popular art but that come across as kitsch. In the tradition of movies like Snow Falling on Cedars, the film, directed by Francois Girard, confuses pretty scenery doused in ponderous music with epic visual poetry. Impenetrable musings intended to evoke ineffable romantic longing leave you scratching your head as you wait, ever more impatiently, for something to happen.
The movie's narrator, Herve Joncour (Michael Pitt), is a military officer in 1860s France who, encouraged by his father, the mayor of a village, is taken under the wing of Baldabiou (Alfred Molina), a greedy, roguish merchant who invites him into the silk trade.
The film's problems begin with Pitt. As he mumbles Herve's story, sometimes inaudibly, his character sounds either supremely detached or heavily medicated. With his swollen, chiseled lips and empty blue eyes that sometimes tear up, Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF GROUPPOWER
Herve is an adventurer and explorer who travels over rugged territory from France to Japan three times in the movie. Pitt has the get-up-and-go of a spoiled lap dog flopped on a cushion. To be fair, though, even an actor with twice his vitality would be hard put to infuse feeling into the maundering dialogue.
Herve's mission is to save Europe's doomed silk industry by bringing home from Japan a cache of silkworm eggs. An epidemic is destroying the eggs in European hatcheries, and Japan, being closed to the West, has an uncontaminated supply. One of his challenges is to penetrate the border. As he makes the trip west to east, mostly over land, from Vienna to Kiev, crossing the Russian steppes and eventually reaching Japan on a smuggler's ship, there is plenty of spectacle. But this choppily edited film barely conveys the distance he travels or the hardship he endures. Nor does Pitt's face register his reaction to anything.
Herve's wife, Helene, a school-teacher played by the ravishing Keira Knightley, is barely present in the movie. We briefly see her pining for her husband's return while he's away and complaining about their childless marriage when he's home. Their infertility is not for lack of trying. Although the two are shown entwined in bed, their nude love scenes (discreetly photographed) have zero chemistry.
Silk is an adaptation by Girard and his screenwriting collaborator Michael Golding of Alessandro Baricco's international best seller. For Girard, the film fits a pattern. His much stronger earlier movies, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin, also demonstrated his predilection for tricky stories with artistic (usually musical) themes. Silk is smothered under a score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto that desperately wants to sound like Arvo Part, especially in piano and violin passages that feature Joshua Bell, who was prominent in The Red Violin. But this music, which is supposed to transport you into the sublime, feels more like silk wallpaper.
On the last leg of Herve's journey, he is led blindfolded from Yamagata harbor to a village in the Japanese interior where he meets with Hara Jubei (Koji Yakusho), a local warlord, to exchange gold for eggs. The transaction completed, he returns by the same route, and with his new wealth buys a house and property that he eventually turns into a field of lilies for Helene.
The movie's tiny dramatic kernel involves Herve's wordless one-time liaison with Hara Jubei's beautiful concubine, which leaves him feeling obsessed and guilty. If the movie's twist ending, involving the translation of two letters from Japanese into French, is worthy of Maupassant, it is so long in arriving that the closest thing to a catharsis it offers is a sense of relief that something finally happened.
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