Silk contains a simple love triangle story but director Francois Gerard goes to painstaking lengths to turn it into a protracted and wearisome art film.
Silk contains a simple love triangle story but director Francois Gerard goes to painstaking lengths to turn it into a protracted and wearisome art film.
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Average Rating: 2.8/5
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Francois Girard's adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's novel Silk stars Michael Pitt as a young Frenchman who travels to Japan at the request of a wealthy silkworm magnate who asks him to smuggle back some new worms. The mission succeeds, and this allows the man to live in great comfort with his wife (Keira Knightley). After a few years, they are unable to conceive a child, a situation that leads to the man taking on a lover during his subsequent visits to Japan. ~ Perry Seibert, Rovi
François Girard's Silk is not merely painterly. It might as well be a painting, for all that it eschews storytelling, forcing the viewer to scan the lush imagery in search of clues to what, if anything, might be going on.
[Director] 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.
In a film that just happens to be about the topic of fabric, Silk like a mannequin draped in an elegant costume, is all shimmering surface and hollow core.
i sta narkotika tha se riksei, i stin katatonia, an kaneis to lathos na tin pareis sta sobara os otidipote allo para eykairia eksaskisis ton kanibalistikon soy enstikton
A problematic period movie, Silk is anything but finely spun. Unaided by lacklusture performances from the leads, director Francois Girard seems more interested in crafting a beautiful travelogue than he does a moving melodrama.
Sluggish storytelling enlivens neither Pitt's infatuation with a local concubine nor the stubbornly feudal society it's set against. Worst of all, though, you just never give a toss.
I've no idea what compelled me to watch this film, either before watching or during and whilst I wouldn't be able to explain the slow plotted story to anyone else, I have to admit that there is something about Michael Pitt that is addictive to watch and perhaps that is what made me stay with this film and strangely I
found it quite enjoyable.
Wonderful period drama-romance story (there goes Kiera Knightley's other period movies since Atonement and Pride & Prejudice). The journeys are probably the best bits in the movie, with lush landscapes filling the screen in all serenity of the turmoils that are yet to come. I thought director Francois Girard tried
to ape Terence Mallick's direction, with lush natural beauty punctuated with voice over narration of the character's inner-most thoughts. We learn a lot of what's going on in Herve's (played by Michael Pitt) mind, as he tells us the story of his being, and the conflict he faces when he gets tempted to committing adultery, never forgetting about his tryst overseas when back home he has a lovely wife (played by Knightley) to go home to.
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