****
Cast: Thandie Newton, David Thewlis, Claudio Santamaria
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Rating: PG
Opens: Now showing, Academy
Review: Greg Dixon
Bernardo Bertolucci is a director who specialises in the breathtaking image. He has an eye for the lush and exotic, an understanding of the simple pleasures of bold primary colours and seems to relish the
grand set-piece.
It is his storytelling skills that sometimes seem absent.
While The Last Emperor showed he can craft neatly woven (if, in that case, over-long) epics, his last outing Stealing Beauty had an aimless drift about it, was little more than a good-looking skin flick and eventually bored.
Besieged is a return to form. An intriguing chess game of a love story, it both echoes and departs from Bertolucci's most famous (infamous to some) romantic fiction, Last Tango In Paris.
Besieged begins with a fleeting nightmare as a young woman, Shandurai (Newton), relives her husband's arrest by the military in an unnamed African country.
She awakens in her modest room, which eventually reveals itself to be the servants' quarters of the inherited, humble home in Rome of an English pianist and painter, Mr Kinsky (the excellent Thewlis, best remembered in Seven Years in Tibet).
He has an intense, full-time relationship with his keyboard, but that does not exclude his growing desire for Shandurai, who cleans for him while studying medicine.
Kinsky eventually offers her his love and a ring, only to discover she is married and her husband is in prison.
He appears to back away, but mysteriously begins selling many of his possessions.
Bertolucci communicates his story carefully, exquisitely, employing little dialogue, using instead a sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh sound and landscape. It's not a silent film; more like a hushed one.
Which means he has had to ask much of his leads, and both grow quietly before the camera - underlining the truth that acting is mostly nothing to do with what is said.
And Bertolucci's images are breathtaking. His commanding use of light and shade is matched only by his masterful application of a range of cinematic devices, such as jump cuts and slow motion.
The overall effect is of a moving, satisfying dream.
Highly recommended.
