Metacritic Film

Silk

Starring Michael Pitt, Kôji Yakusho, Keira Knightley, Alfred Molina, Mark Rendall, and Sei Ashina

MPAA RATING: R for sexuality and nudity

Picturehouse
Drama | Romance
110 minutes | Color
Canada / France / Italy / UK / Japan
Released In Theaters September 14, 2007

Based on the number one international bestselling novel by Alessandro Baricco, Silk is a sweeping romantic drama woven around a material of ethereal fragility: silkworm eggs. When the pébrine epidemic--the spotted silkworm disease that ravaged eggs from European hatcheries in the 1860s--spread overseas, eggs from as far away as Africa and India became infected; thus, the entire European silk trade seemed doomed. To continue his lucrative trade, Baldabiou--a roguish French trader--decides to send young military officer Herve Joncour on a perilous mission to Japan, separating Herve for months on end from Helene, his lovely and devoted schoolteacher wife. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal, Japan produced the finest silk in the world for thousands of years and was considered a dominion forbidden to foreigners--quite literally the opposite end of the world. It is here that Herve encounters the powerful and feared local baron, Hara Jubei, with whom he will trade for the precious silkworm eggs. And it is here, in a world unlike anything that Herve has experienced before, that he becomes entranced by the baron's concubine, a deeply mysterious girl of intoxicating beauty. Without speaking one another's language, they share a doomed, obsessive love. A film of painterly beauty and ravishing romance, Silk is a historically rapturous epic romance of east meets west. (Picturehouse)

WRITTEN BY
Michael Golding
François Girard
Alessandro Baricco (novel)

DIRECTED BY
François Girard

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

39 / 100

Critic Reviews

75	New York Post As sensuous as its title, Silk is an exquisitely felt love story that unfolds as delicately as a blooming flower. And as slowly.
58	The Onion (A.V. Club) Sensual but profoundly silly, Silk is ultimately little more than softcore porn with arthouse trappings, a moony, dopily romantic "Red Shoe Diaries" variation for the NPR set.
50	The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Though elegantly staged, Silk is badly written and indifferently cast.
50	San Francisco Chronicle Joshua Kosman Beautiful but flimsy film.
50	Chicago Reader Joshua Katzman A visually arresting period piece.
50	TV Guide Cinematographer Alain Dostie's stunning, painterly cinematography is the best -- and perhaps only -- reason to endure this stunted epic.
50	Chicago Sun-Times Everything is brought together at the end in a flash of revelation that is spectacularly underwhelming.
50	Seattle Post-Intelligencer Failing to make a lick of rational sense, Silk grasps at poetic straws.
50	Los Angeles Times Though the film aspires to the epic with pretensions of deeper philosophical meaning, it ultimately settles for being the "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" of historical romances.
42	Entertainment Weekly Wan, generically pretty adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's 1996 novel.
40	The New York Times Mr. Pitt is a reasonably photogenic specimen. But this actor, whose typical screen character is a broken, androgynous man-child, is disastrously miscast.
38	New York Daily News By the end of Francois Gerard's plodding, uninvolving melodrama, his boredom will have nothing on yours.
38	ReelViews By any standards, Silk is a bad movie: pretentious, stillborn, devoid of emotion.
20	Variety Silk is a snooze. Vacuous, arid and terminally dull, this adaptation of Alessandro Baricco's freak bestseller hasn't a trace of real life or energy to it, and is hamstrung by a lethargic lead performance by Michael Pitt.
10	Village Voice Julia Wallace Silk isn’t just bad. It’s utterly mad. It stutters and hiccups from scene to scene, from country to country, but never once does it make narrative or emotional sense.

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