Silk
Francois Girard, the Canadian director who started things off so well in 1993 with Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, certainly has taken a bit of a creative dive. In 1998, Girard directed The Red Violin. Almost ten years later, Girard would finally direct again and 2007’s bland, tepid Silk was the result of the long wait. A film adaptation of Italian author Alessandro Baricco’s novel of the same name, Silk is a good-looking film with little-to-no substance lurking beneath the surface.
The problems with the film originate with the screenplay and with the casting, for the most part. Baricco’s novel is about a simple love triangle, yet Girard manges to fudge any and all simplicity out of the fabric of the film and leaves us with a convoluted yarn that tries so hard to use its environment that it almost winds up abusing it with overkill.
Michael Pitt, who played a Kurt Cobain-inspired rocker in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, stars here as Hervé Joncour. Joncour’s job is to travel the world looking for silkworms to bring back to his village in France. He does this because silkworms in Europe are infected with some sort of virus or disease. Joncour first heads to Africa to get new silkworms, but it turns out those are infected as well so he has to go to Japan. His boss, Baldabiou (Alfred Molina), oversees the proceedings back home while Joncour heads out around the world to get worms.
Joncour is madly in love with his wife, Hélène (Keira Knightley), but manages to become rather smitten with an elusive concubine (Sei Ashina). On a second journey to Japan, Joncour sees the concubine again but this time has sex with another concubine instead. He heads back home again, still smitten with the first concubine. Joncour is still madly in love with Hélène, too, so things remain normal at home for quite some time. The film follows this apparent love triangle to its fruition and takes the longest, windiest road to get there.
Keira Knightley is good as Hélène, but the role seems stupid and wasteful. She simply waits at home while we follow a much less interesting character to Japan and back a few times. Instead of pressing on what must be going through her head, we are given scenes of reunited love and a few steamy sex scenes. The relationship between her character and Michael Pitt’s character seems tasteless and lukewarm, at best, as the love scenes lack passion and fervour.
Michael Pitt is the real problem with the cast, though. While Alfred Molina certainly tries hard enough in his unfortunate role, Pitt is the opposite and could not seem more bored. Unluckily, he is also given the task of narration and this plunges the already half-hearted film into some serious snoozer territory. I half-expected Pitt to begin sentences with a series of “um, well” variations and the idea that he was supposed to be French was just outright hilarious. None of the characters even tried for an accent, which I guess demonstrates that the filmmakers do know of the concept of mercy.
The soundtrack to Silk actually serves to increase the film’s blandness and adds silly piano punctuations at all the wrong moments. There are scenes in which a light tinkle of piano is nestled in between a paused pair of sentences and the results are as though a light bulb went off in a character’s head. This sort of unintentional silliness really fries the core of this movie, making it above and beyond an average bore and moving it slowly and begrudgingly into the territory of the ultimately silly snoozefest.
Skip Silk.
Trailer:
