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.
Nine Taiwanese nervously stand on an observation platform at Tokyo’s Haneda International Airport. It’s 9:20am on March 27, 1968, and they are awaiting the arrival of Liu Wen-ching (柳文卿), who is about to be deported back to Taiwan where he faces possible execution for his independence activities. As he is removed from a minibus, a tenth activist, Dai Tian-chao (戴天昭), jumps out of his hiding place and attacks the immigration officials — the nine other activists in tow — while urging Liu to make a run for it. But he’s pinned to the ground. Amid the commotion, Liu tries to
A dozen excited 10-year-olds are bouncing in their chairs. The small classroom’s walls are lined with racks of wetsuits and water equipment, and decorated with posters of turtles. But the students’ eyes are trained on their teacher, Tseng Ching-ming, describing the currents and sea conditions at nearby Banana Bay, where they’ll soon be going. “Today you have one mission: to take off your equipment and float in the water,” he says. Some of the kids grin, nervously. They don’t know it, but the students from Kenting-Eluan elementary school on Taiwan’s southernmost point, are rare among their peers and predecessors. Despite most of
A pig’s head sits atop a shelf, tufts of blonde hair sprouting from its taut scalp. Opposite, its chalky, wrinkled heart glows red in a bubbling vat of liquid, locks of thick dark hair and teeth scattered below. A giant screen shows the pig draped in a hospital gown. Is it dead? A surgeon inserts human teeth implants, then hair implants — beautifying the horrifyingly human-like animal. Chang Chen-shen (張辰申) calls Incarnation Project: Deviation Lovers “a satirical self-criticism, a critique on the fact that throughout our lives we’ve been instilled with ideas and things that don’t belong to us.” Chang
The resignation of Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) co-founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) as party chair on Jan. 1 has led to an interesting battle between two leading party figures, Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) and Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如). For years the party has been a one-man show, but with Ko being held incommunicado while on trial for corruption, the new chair’s leadership could be make or break for the young party. Not only are the two very different in style, their backgrounds are very different. Tsai is a co-founder of the TPP and has been with Ko from the very beginning. Huang has