Expectations for Silk dissolve on screen
When confronted with the opportunity to revisit director François Girard, anyone familiar with his last film, the sublime The Red Violin (1998), would jump at the slightest whisper of Silk, his follow-up film arriving nearly a decade later. Silk opened extremely quietly this past weekend to paltry box office numbers and nonexistent press. Yet perhaps even more depressing is the obvious drop in film quality between the two, with the beauty and flow of The Red Violin replaced with a plodding and bland narrative flop in Silk.
The narrative follows Hervé Joncour (Michael Pitt), an 1860s French army officer, who is recruited by entrepreneur Baldabiou (Alfred Molina) to venture the long journey to Japan to supply Baldabiou with fresh silk worm eggs for his growing silk mill. Joncour quickly marries Hélène Joncour (Keira Knightley) before he sets off on the dangerous voyage to the east.
After he succeeds in making the journey to Japan, he becomes obsessed with his Japanese trader's concubine, as she seems to seduce him with her stolid movements and long glances. As he returns to France, then revisits Japan twice, his love life becomes increasingly mired by his tired desperation, with him being entangled in a Japanese civil war upon his final visit.
What is presented here is quite simply a mess. There's no rhythm to his Japanese expeditions, no exploration of his actual journey to the far- away land, nor to the increasingly tenuous relationship between him and his eastern trader. We're given a tragic love story with no real love, which makes the tragedy seem just that much more paltry.
Knightley treads water throughout the film, filling up space and time and sometimes lovely French dresses, sometimes not. Yet despite the occasional Knightley nipple flash, there's really no movement here to speak of. The movement should be of the two women melding into one, which is actually attempted, though to an absurdly clumsy result.
The women's movement is filled with steam from hot baths and warm pools, depriving the film of its movement as well. And with a film that deals so heavily with the movement between lands and women, the lack thereof makes this mess that much more disappointing.
Girard shoots the film plainly, looking uninterested in the entire process of the joining of the two women. The translator that attempts to join the two with the movement of words appears much more interesting, though her part is cut to barely anything.
Instead, Girard finds the mist of the warm pools far more engaging, yet he ruins this rising action with still figures, pasted into the effervescent scenery they should be a part of but remain detached from-like the audience.
With The Red Violin displaying incredible skill in developing a sense of the flow of objects through time, Silk, attempting a similar feat with love, ultimately fails. So here's hoping that in another decade, when Girard reappears, we'll be treated to a vision of movement that mirrors our own dreams that wander through the mist.
