tedg Gosh, yet another movie with a delicious idea, but mediocre execution. The thing is boring in a pretty way and vaguely calls up romantic notions of singular love. You may not make it until the end, but I urge you to, because the structure is delicious.It has a triple frame, skeins between two worlds and a one-armed billiard master who triggers all. One frame is the man in the story, the target of love, sitting in a garden that his now-dead wife has unfolded for him. He is sitting with his wife's designated listener, and he recites the story that we have seen leading to this. Another frame is the letter which I will focus on. This letter is the centerpiece of a scene quite late in the movie. I know this is originally a book, but it seems to be one conceived cinematically so it is fair to say that this scene is likely to have been envisioned first. We have an ordinary, truly nondescript Frenchman who is chosen to be the connection between two worlds, his world of the earth and garden and another exotic world. He finds a love in both worlds, each natural to the forces in that world.His love at home is played by a dull Keira Knightly. His love in Japan is a Chinese woman, unreachable. This letter is to him in France, from that Chinese woman, writing in Japanese from a location whence she was taken to make her unreachable to him. Now the letter is read to him in the scene that is highly structured. We look at the woman reading, a lovely Asian woman who acts as surrogate writer. We see our man in a mirror, and it is the mirror folds that are wonderful here.This letter is a mirror of one first passed to him. That letter is literally folded in the Shinto fashion where the strokes of the calligraphy are intended to bleed into each other as metapoetry. This second letter is later unfolded when our man comes back to this reader and all is revealed. Here is the structure:The Chinese lover who wrote the letter was a second concubine to a warlord with an honored wife. This lover had her affair with our man through a surrogate concubine. Her letter is read in the scene by another professional surrogate, a (high class) Japanese prostitute in France, who herself is one step removed from her lost Eurpoean love. She reads the letter as if she were the distant Chinese lover. But wait! She actually did write the letter in a conflation of folds of distance-surrogacy and the inherent two-world nature of romance. But wait again, for in yet another fold of the letter we learn that though the alluring prostitute did write the letter, she did not compose it. That was done by the French wife, in a secret act of love.Love, my folded readers, love as a carefully folded letter.Here is the letter. Note the peculiar grammar of "sense" at the end:My dear master, do not be afraid. Do not move. Do not speak. No one will see us. Stay as you are. I want to look at you. We have the night to ourselves and I want to look at you. Your body for me, your skin, your lips... close your eyes. No one can see us, and I am here at your side. Do you feel me?When I touch you for the first time, it will be with my lips. You will feel the warmth, but you will not know where. Perhaps it will be on your eyes. I will press my mouth to your eyes and you will feel the warm. Open your eyes now my beloved. Look at me, your eyes on my breasts, your arms lifting me, letting me slide onto you. My faint cry. Your body quivering. There is no end to it, don't you see?You will forever be throwing your head back. I will forever be shaking off my tears.This moment had to be. This moment is, and this moment will continue, from now until forever. We shall not see one another again; what we were meant to do we have done. Believe me my love, we have done it forever. Preserve your life out of my reach, and if it serves your happiness, do not hesitate for a moment to forget this woman for no sense without a trace of regret. Farewell.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Quebec_Dragon Adapted from a rather short but great novel, they had space to expand it in the movie but didn't make the most of it. It has nice cinematography, a good soundtrack (with a beautiful main theme used in trailers), solid base story and good acting by Kiera Knightley. However, it's a love story and I wasn't moved by the romantic aspects one bit. I think the main fault lies with the main actor who just didn't convey emotions well enough. He looks good but seriously lacks in acting chops, at least in this one. The chemistry between the actors was also severely lacking. The pace was slow, which can sometimes work in period pieces to improve the atmosphere, but unfortunately here it was mostly a detriment. It might be worth a rental but I would pick other period romantic stories first.Rating: 5 out of 10

lor_ 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.

ryob7137 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.