BesiegedAn intimate mood piece that sees Bertolucci collaborating for the first time with cinematographer Fabio Cianchetti and editor Jacopo Quadri, Besieged reveals the director's seemingly effortless command of framing, camera movement and choreography. Cianchetti's and Quadri's rhythms are perfectly in harmony with the dreamily fluid camerawork that is the signature of all Bertolucci's films.
Shandurai (Thandie Newton) is a resolute African immigrant with a traumatic past, putting herself through medical school by keeping house for the enigmatic Kinsky (David Thewlis), a reclusive English musician less given to talk than to symbolic gestures of devotion. With its winding staircase and a dumb-waiter connecting Shandurai's bedroom to the upper storeys of the house, Kinsky's raffishly decorated home near Rome's Spanish Steps seems to be both womb and prison-like; an uneasy sanctuary affording its emotionally exiled inhabitants spaces in which to retreat from one another but also to be drawn together.
Music is privileged over language in the finely modulated and ultimately liberating 'dance' that Bertolucci orchestrates between the initially wary Shandurai and the ungainly Kinsky in a film suffused with sensuality.
The director appears poised to return to the intimate scale and exploration of interior states so consummately rendered in Besieged in a new film about to go into production in Rome; a two-hander based on an adaptation of Niccolo' Ammaniti's best-selling novella, Me and You (Io e te).
New 35mm print.
"A delicately wrought, frequently wordless romantic drama...brilliantly acted by its two leads, its spare and elliptical script given weight and resonance by the richly dark tones of Fabio Cianchetti's cinematography" - Toronto International Film Festival
