Watch Silk For Free

Absolutely the worst movie.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Hervé Joncour (Michael Pitt) is a young Frenchman who marries Hélène (Keira Knightley) in 1862. Baldabiou (Alfred Molina) refurbishes the silk mills but needs new silkworms. Silkworms are dying all over the world, and he hires Hervé to go to Africa to retrieve the eggs. The disease has traveled to Africa and infected the eggs he brought back. Hervé has to travel to the forbidden Japanese interior to trade for some uncontaminated eggs risking his life. While in Japan, he is taken by a beautiful woman (Sei Ashina) who is the concubine of a local lord. Even when he goes back to France, he is haunted by his infatuation.Michael Pitt is sadly stiff and unemotional in this one. The story is slow, laborious and long despite its 109 minutes running time. Keira Knightley is only in the movie intermittently. Director François Girard creates a grinding plodding melodrama. He treats every frame like an oil painting. The only saving grace in this is the gorgeous locations and the beauty on the screen. This works better as a travelogue. It would be more interesting to see an actual tea ceremony.

Silk was a flop, not the international success its backers had hoped for after the director's The Red Violin made such a splash a decade earlier. It is worthy of attention, in pinpointing some cautionary messages to other would-be Visionary (that recently overworked term) filmmakers.1. TRAVELOGUE: Film is unfortunately a highly literal, through visuals, medium, and it is easy to become mesmerized by the shots. Mature directors scrupulously avoid this pitfall, but perhaps Canadian director Francois Girard has subconsciously assimilated the approach of Terrence Malick. Like Malick, he only ventures forth from his artistic cave once a decade, and feels compelled to make each shot the most perfect and beautiful of all time. This is not cinema -this is "how I spent my vacation" -a $20,000,000 slide show.2. FOOLED BY THE RUSHES: It could be a by-product of the far-flung co-production status (Silk is structured officially as a Canadian/Italian/Japanese project, an unusual combo), but the movie displays an age-old problem of Hollywood, caused by over-monitoring of the rushes. Many a stiff, stolid film result has looked "marvelous" in the dailies. Studios traditionally made decisions like director firings or bringing in a troubleshooter to haul in the reins on a project based on the quality of the rushes. This makes sense in a bean-counter universe, but has nothing to do with the ultimate movie, which as Hitchcock noted, is stored in the director's head. Watching Silk I was struck that the rushes coming back from the various locations truly must have looked fabulous, but that is no indicator that they would ultimately amount to anything in a gestalt sense. Only the director and his editors know what will be needed in terms of coverage, and how the pieces might mesh into a whole. It's easy to get bamboozled by striking shots, just as at the other extreme it's easy to assume the worst when a neophyte director falls behind schedule and isn't giving the execs their daily meters of processed celluloid.3. DISTANCING: Brecht and Godard have long been the inspiration for film directors to keep the audience at a safe distance -break up the naturally hypnotic effect that a movie has for the viewer, which Hitchcock exploited to a fare-thee-well. In Silk, Girard uses the crutch of voice-over narration to sabotage one's involvement in the action/dialog/story. Like Zentropa, another pretentious exercise by a wannabe "visionary" director, the somnolent narration literally puts the viewer to sleep. His insistence on oft-criticized bland American accents for French characters further abstracts the story, and makes it near-impossible to smoothly enter into the life of the protagonists. Low affect is the instruction to lead Michael Pitt and even Alfred Molina, the latter bringing professional life to his rattled off exposition, and even some wit. Keira Knightley gets to actually emote in her patented shy-but-effusive manner, but I noticed the director cutting away from her as quickly as possible, and even though she is the key central figure of the story's romantic theme, her overall screen time is reduced to the bare minimum. The dialog by Girard and Michael Golding is almost all in the form of recitations: never sounding natural or using vernacular. That's as big a mistake as the bland American accents.4. CRYPTIC: Adapting a novel is difficult; perhaps this is why the Academy gives a separate Oscar category for adaptations as opposed to the Original Screenplay niche for the Woody Allens of the world. Too often a film (or TV) adaptation REQUIRES that the viewer be not just conversant but well-nigh totally immersed in the source work in order to appreciate the film. (I recently watched the British TV series A Dance to the Music of Time, via Netflix, after a marathon reading of all 12 Powell novels it's based upon, and the damn thing would have made no sense whatsoever without having the books fresh in my mind.) For Silk, many basic and virtually all nuanced elements are lost without knowledge of the source, a damning fault. The intended purity of not subtitling the Japanese dialog segments falls squarely into this problem area too. The movie should stand alone, and if it can't, why bother? It's not impossible -everybody's favorite of all-time The Godfather saw Coppola creating a work of art that never requires one to go back and read Mario Puzo's pulp novel.5. THE PITT FACTOR: Folks love to criticize young Mr. Pitt, an actor who future generations will scratch their heads over: "how did he get into so many films?". Pauly Shore, Phillips Holmes in the '30s, and many 4-F performers like Sonny Tufts and William Prince during WW II come to mind. Following the death of James Dean, for over a decade innumerable folks imitated his breakthrough persona, of which I recall Michael Parks and Christopher Jones becoming the most typecast. Now we have Mr. Pitt, the lookalike thespian doomed to live in the shadow of Leonardo DiCaprio, let alone his equally handsome namesake Brad. What a cross to bear! 6. UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY: I was reminded of Werner Herzog's overlooked classic Heart of Glass while watching Silk. Both films have transcendentally beautiful landscapes. Underneath the main romantic and cross-cultural themes, they have the same core parable: a one-industry community (Glassblowing in Herzog, Silk creation here) poised on the edge of disaster. Herzog hypnotized his cast to get a unique, otherworldly effect. Girard has Pitt & most others sleepwalking, to null effect.

This movie was a complete train wreck, it seemed to be in shambles from the very beginning. The story was quite boring, the acting was mediocre at best, and the images were stale. Many people are saying the images were beautiful, but I would completely disagree. This film is trying to be overly artsy and ends up detracting from the potential of some of the scenes. If you are searching for a beautifully shot film, may I suggest something like House of Flying Daggers or Hero. As far as acting goes, even Keira Knightley's performance was disappointing. As seen in the Jacket, Knightley's American accent just does not seem to work and ends up being distracting from her performance, coupled with the weak script the film just begins to flop. This movie just falters on so many levels, has some serious plot holes and fails to connect on any level. I have not read the book and many people seem to say that you should read the book before watching this film, but purely as a stand alone movie this film just does not work.

A trader from Japan arrives in a small English village in the mid-19th century. He is not particularly handsome or charismatic, he can't even speak English, but the town leader's vivacious, sultry wife, played by Keira Knightley, falls in love with the Japanese man and urges him to take her away. Why? Because any Japanese man who turns up has to be better than what the British male has to offer. The Japanese man is haunted by a glimpse he caught of Keira naked, slowly immersing herself in river water. Finally, he realises it is all an illusion, and that the woman he truly loves is his recently deceased Japanese wife. His wife then replaces Keira in his dreams of the river, but decently clothed...You don't buy it, do you? Then why are we expected to swallow it in reverse? This is a lusciously shot, lyrical, understated piece of orientalist claptrap. Michael Pitt takes insipid to new levels, and Sei Ashina has to put up with a credit as 'The Girl,' probably because they couldn't get away with calling her 'Asian Eye Candy.' Not surprisingly, Sei Ashina is a newcomer - no experienced Japanese actress worth her salt would have taken on such a demeaning role. Ashina will forever live down her involvement in this film, I fear.This should have been a breakout film for the wonderful Miki Nakatani, but she is lost in a stilted role. Koji Yakusho is as forceful as ever, and as such is mis-cast - why would any woman leave this guy, especially for a simpering Eurobrat? The reveal at the end shows, ironically, the film this should have been. The woman wronged, the woman whose love should define this film, is Hélène. The whole thing should have been re-written from her perspective. Hervé's infatuation with a pretty girl he saw on his travels should have been just that, a minor issue in a great love story. Focussing on Hervé's delusional obsession is regrettable. Implying that the Japanese woman had reciprocal feelings is feeble-minded.In sum, great actors in cinematic locations and a story with bags of potential wasted by mindless Eurocentrics.