FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | preview: François Girard's Silk |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Tuesday, 11 September 2007 | |
 Keira Knightley and Michael Pitt in François Girard's 'Silk'. Photo (c): Picturehouse. Some books are obvious candidates for a big-screen adaptation, while others would certainly give quite a few directors pause before saying yes. Kubrick famously described Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer as impossible to film, though German director Tom Tykwer has proven him wrong. Hopefully the same can be said of French-Canadian director François Girard (Le violon rouge / The Red Violin), who has adapted Alessandro Baricco’s sparse and intensely lyrical bestseller Silk for the big screen. The film adaptation of Silk stars US actor Michael Pitt (The Dreamers), British actress Keira Knightley (Atonement) and Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho (Babel) and just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. A co-production between Canada, France, Italy, the UK and Japan, Silk will be released this autumn in most countries.
Baricco's most popular and perhaps his most enduring work is his 1996 novella Silk. The work is not even a hundred pages long and divided in 65 short chapters. In Silk and his preceding output -- if not exactly everything he has written since -- the author's supple and at times inventive use of language and the constant integration of elements from fairy tales, mythology and storytelling archetypes make him the direct heir to Italian literary giant Italo Calvino, whose total number of filmed novels can be counted on one hand (and none of which are famous) for good reason: they are unfilmable. Until the release of Silk and the upcoming Lezione 21 (Lesson 21), a film Baricco himself wrote and directed, Baricco adaptations have all been from one work: the popular theatre monologue Novecento, which inspired the interesting but flawed feature-length adaptation La leggenda del pianista sull'oceano from Giuseppe Tornatore as well as an animated short and a TV film. Novecento was originally written as a one-man play in which all the delirious visual concoctions were so powerful exactly because they had to be imagined; it was up to the man on stage to conjure up images in the mind's eye of the audience through Baricco's words; seeing the images as conjured up by a director, production designer and CGI artist is not quite the same experience. Like Novecento, Silk (or Seta as the original title runs) is incredibly evocative. It is also about as close to a poem as a novel can get, using repetitions and other techniques borrowed from poetry to put the reader into a sort of trance, while a good portion of the novella’s strength also comes from its harrowing ending. While most works of fiction (and most films) peter out towards the end or simply cut away from the action, Baricco’s final twist -- if that is not too heretical a word -- is true to the idea of the sonnet’s volta ("turning point") a ninth-line revelation that leads to a conclusion that is both logical and shocking.
In Silk, Hervé Joncour (Pitt) is a silkworm merchant who is enticed by local notable Baldabiou (Alfred Molina) to go to Japan to get new silkworm eggs. He leaves behind his wife Hélène (Knightley) and goes on a dangerous trek through Oriental Europe and Russia to reach Japan. Once there, while staying in the house of his trade partner Hara Jubei (Yakusho) he falls under the spell of Jubei's concubine. Though he has to go back home to Hélène whom he loves, he stays in touch with the mysterious woman by writing, even though she writes to him in Japanese and it is rather dangerous to have her letters translated, seen what their contents reveals about Joncour. Will Girard be able to premiere a second successful literary adaptation starring Knightley this year after her acclaimed turn in Joe Wright's version of Ian McEwan's Atonement? What is clear is that it is quite a task he has set himself to try and film such a small yet intricate, complex and powerful work (it is one of the few recent novels that have spawned two English translations in less than ten years). Production designer François Séguin and cinematographer Alain Dostie, who both worked with Girard on Le violon rouge, seem to have had their work cut out for them. Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who won an Oscar for his work on Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, wrote the film's score. Related links: |
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