nwasianweekly.com
Sept. 15, 2007

Photo provided by Picturehouse

The final confrontation between wealthy baron Hara Jubei (Koji Yakusho) and silkworm merchant Hervé Joncour (Michael Pitt) unfurls at gunpoint intensity.

Film not as smooth as name implies

By N.P. Thompson

Northwest Asian Weekly

Alessandro Baricco’s 1996 international bestseller “Silk” arrives on the big screen nearly as dead as the diseased silkworm grubs that set its slender storyline in motion. The Canadian director François Girard and his co-scenarist Michael Golding negate any potential for dramatic momentum by the incessant use of voiceovers to explain the thoughts and actions of their 19th-century protagonist, a French silkworm merchant named Hervé Joncour, here embodied by a desperately miscast Michael Pitt.

Pitt has given engaging performances elsewhere, notably in Bernardo Bertolucci’s underrated “The Dreamers” and in his other current film, “Delirious,” in which he plays a homeless youth-turned-reality-TV sensation. As Joncour, however, an upper-crust gentleman of the early 1860s, Pitt doesn’t even try to invent a believable character. The normally handsome 26-year-old looks pudgy-faced and morose throughout; furthermore, he has several key scenes opposite the veteran actor Koji Yakusho (a 10-time nominee and two-time winner of the Japanese Academy Award), who utterly out-circles his young American co-star.

In the pre-Pasteur days of “Silk,” a pébrine epidemic across Europe, Africa and India kills off the larvae before they can hatch, leaving northern Japan as the last spot on the globe to gather untainted eggs. Joncour traverses stormy, slate-colored oceans and windswept, snow-covered hillsides (the film does boast exquisite scenery, and more on that anon). His journey brings him to the Fukushima village of wealthy baron Hara Jubei (Yakusho) and, more significantly, to the baron’s mistress, known only as The Girl (Sei Ashina), both of whom adore skinny dipping in the steam-shrouded hot springs nearby.

Even in his slightly stilted English, Yakusho has a commanding presence. He’ll have a hostile edge in his voice yet smile anyway, as powerful men often do. The final confrontation between Hara Jubei and Joncour unfurls at gunpoint intensity, momentarily allowing “Silk” to breathe.

Girard and cinematographer Alain Dostie create short montages of rural Japan in winter, visually eloquent nature poems including a close up of icicles melting on the right of the frame, while the left remains a blank of snowy white. They follow this with a wide-angle shot of an elderly Japanese woman dressed in gray, standing alone in a field as snow sifts downward. Later, the bare branches of a tree on the right engulf the center and left side of the screen in ebony ribbons that might be a woman’s hair, the black swirls belonging to the concubine over whom Joncour obsesses. Composer Ryuichi Sakamoto accompanies some of these images with solos for iwabue, a piercingly high, harmonica-like stone flute, superbly played by Carlos Nuñez.

The filmmakers adapt Baricco’s 91-page novella more or less faithfully until, once back in France, Joncour receives a letter from The Girl, and here Girard departs disastrously from the author’s intent. Joncour asks a Japanese prostitute (Miki Nakatani) living in Lyon to translate for him. In the book, the erotically charged epistle instructs the Frenchman to masturbate (while The Girl watches) as a prelude to oral sex and beyond, to what she discreetly refers to as “sweet violence.” What was hot and feverish on the page becomes tepid on film. Joncour’s excitement over this was the whole point of the scene, and the prostitute, presumably aroused as well, then expected him to go to bed with her. Girard and Golding excise every mention of sex from the letter, a hypocritically puritanical choice in light of Ashina’s earlier full frontal nudity.

You’d think, in any movie that has an R rating to uphold, the filmmakers would have done the right thing and gone all the way.

“Silk” opens Sept. 14 at Uptown Cinemas, 511 Queen Anne Ave N., Seattle, and Seven Gables Theatre, 911 N.E. 50th St., Seattle. For ticket prices and showtimes, call 206-285-1022 (Uptown) or 206-781-5755 (Seven Gables).

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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