'Silk' spins history for dummies
When Francois Girard's "Silk" premieres on home video, it should come wrapped in a bright yellow cover marked with big, block letters: "Pretentious Historical Dramas for Dummies."
Take the scene where we see French adventurer Herve Joncour travel by train to Vienna. His voice-over narration announces, "I traveled by train to Vienna."
When Herve returns home for a blissful summer with his lovely wife Helene, the narration blurts, "It was a happy time that summer!"
From its opening line, "Silk" announces its intent to relentlessly batter us with heavy-handed narration that tells us stuff we already know.
It starts with a wimpy, disembodied narrator intoning, "Why should I tell you about her? Why now? Maybe I just need to tell someone."
Or maybe, you just need a cleverer way to introduce this emotionally zapped romance that refuses to let its beautiful images tell part of the story.
The narrator turns out to be former "Dawson's Creek" heartthrob Michael Pitt as Herve, a French soldier returning home during the 1860s. He no sooner marries his boring sweetheart Helene (Keira Knightley) than local businessman Baldabiou (former Doc Oc Alfred Molina) dispatches him on a perilous expedition that could net them a fortune.
Herve travels to Japan to secretly secure silkworm eggs, valuable commodities capable of giving his town a financial boon in the silk industry. While in Japan, Herve befriends the blandest leader in Japanese movie history, baron Hara Jubei (Koji Yakusho).
Herve also meets the baron's lovely Chinese concubine, a woman so exquisitely beautiful, the narrator won't shut up about her. He won't shut up about anything. Like the time Herve returns to Japan to find the baron's village burned during the rebellion. "The rebellion had reached the village!" the narrator tells us.
Gee, thanks, narrator.
Weirdly enough, everyone in "Silk" utters dialogue in breathless, whispery sentences, as if Nicole Kidman gave them elocution lessons.
In 1998, director Girard gave us the excellent historical drama "The Red Violin," one of the greatest movies ever ignored by the general public. "Red Violin" had only one major flaw, a superfluous flashback that assumed viewers to be stupid and forgetful.
Girard's "Silk" assumes viewers to be stupid all the time, succumbing to the same over-narration problem that plagued the Goodman Theater's stage adaptation of "Silk" back in 2005.
The movie version of "Silk" compounds its narrative problems by bluntly lying to us. After Herve becomes depressed over losing millions of eggs, his narrator alter ego says, "I sank into silence."
If only that had really happened.
"Silk"
1 1/2 star
out of four
Opens today
Starring As
Michael Pitt Herve Joncour
Alfred Molina Baldabiou
Keira Knightley Helene Joncour
Koji Yakusho Hara Jubei
Written by Francois Girard and Michael Golding; based on the novel by Alessandro Baricco. Produced by Niv Fichman, Nadine Luque, Domenico Procacci and Sonoko Sakai. Directed by Francois Girard. A Picturehouse release. Rated R (sexual situations, nudity). Running time: 116 minutes.