BESIEGED

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ON 15TH NOVEMBER 2007, 6 PM

AT conference hall, cochin media school, near south overbridge, ernakulam

Besieged (1998)
(Run time: 90 min.),
directed by Bernardo Bertolucci,
written by Claire Peploe and Bertolucci,
photographed by Fabio Cianchetti and
starring Thandie Newton and David Thewlis.

What we have here is one of that rare breed of movies that can flaunt both style and substance; visual éclat as well as thoughtful thematic undertones. Coming to us from the famed Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor, Stealing Beauty), Besieged is an involving, artful love story and a meditative look at lives lost and lives gained as one moves to a higher social existence.
The film begins with African folk music, and a young woman named Shangurai (Thandie Newton) riding her bike along a bumpy road in what seems to be South Africa. Menacing-looking cars pass her, and before long she sees her husband, a local schoolteacher, being dragged to jail. Devastated, Shangurai relocates to Rome (the move happens in a flash: I missed it), where she becomes a live-in housekeeper for an eccentric American man named Mr. Kinsky (David Thewlis).
Kinsky falls in love with the beautiful Shangurai and passionately asks for her hand in marriage, saying that he will do anything to make her love him, to which she responds "Get my husband out of jail!" The impeccably well-intentioned Kinsky backs off, and unbeknownst to her starts a campaign to set Shangurai's hubby free. Evidently, she figures it out and is shocked, because he sells everything, including his beloved piano to make his love happy.
The significance of Besieged lies in the transition between Shangurai's two lives. Her first is the one she led in Africa, and the culture and memories stick with her. She has trouble letting them go; this is manifested through music and her faith for her lost husband. And yet as her life in Rome progresses, she is mesmerized by Kinsky and his existence until finally, in the ending, their heretofore affair erupts and leaves Shangurai's previous life outside the front door.
This is at the core of Bertolucci's film, which actually consists of minimal dialogue. What it does have, however, is visuals aplenty; a cornucopia of gorgeous images and deft camerawork. Bertolucci has a way of moving the camera at blazing speed yet having the film flow smoothly. Watch for this during Shangurai and Kinsky's first main conversation: the lens moves frantically from one face to the other creating a level of tension while at the same time maintaining the film's consistently hypnotic mood and pace.
Bernardo Bertolucci
Very few international directors in the past four decades have managed to remain at the “critically successful” as consistently as Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, whose career has straddled three generations of filmmaking, four continents, and several movie industries. Alongside his provocative explorations of sexuality and ideology, his highly kinetic visual style – often characterised by elaborate camera moves, meticulous lighting, symbolic use of colour, and inventive editing – has influenced several generations of filmmakers, from the American “movie brats” of the 1970s to the music video auteurs of the '80s and '90s. Perhaps the most important reason for Bertolucci's continuing relevance has been the intensely personal nature of his movies: although he makes narrative features, very often based (albeit loosely) on outside literary sources, Bertolucci's films over the decades reveal distinct connections to their creator's private dilemmas and the vagaries of his creative and intellectual life. In other words, he has been able to fulfill his dream of being able “to live films” and “to think cinematographically” – to lay bare his inner life through his work.
Bertolucci was born to a prosperous family in Parma, Italy. His father, Attilio, was a well-known poet and writer. He exerted a considerable influence on the young Bernardo, who became an award-winning poet himself at the age of 21 and spent his teen years enamoured with the cinema, thanks to his father's work as a film critic. At around the same time, Bernardo entered the world of filmmaking as an assistant to another Italian poet, Attilio's friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, on the writer's first feature, Accatone (1961). A five-page treatment by Pasolini led to Bertolucci's own first feature, The Grim Reaper (La commare secca) (1962), an episodic, Rashomon-style investigation into the murder of a prostitute seen through the points-of-view of the dispossessed denizens of a Roman park. The impression of youth shows: The Grim Reaper, despite showing some early signs of Bertolucci's personal style (expressionistic lighting, a highly mobile camera, and an inventive, time-hopping narrative structure), feels more like a Pasolini film, not the least because of its subproletarian milieu.
Many of Bertolucci's early films work simultaneously as homages and exorcisms. Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard were the filmmaker's twin spiritual fathers in the 1960s, and the latter's influence is clearly evident in Partner (1968), Bertolucci's third feature, an attempt at the elliptical, playful, highly symbolic, and politically active style of Godard's post-nouvelle vague filmmaking. A loose adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Double, Partner is the story of a young idealist (Pierre Clementi) who is faced with his politically revolutionary, socially active, and possibly psychotic doppelganger. Full of attempts at Brechtian distanciation (onscreen text, direct address to the camera, etc.), the film today retains a certain fascination for the ways in which the power of Bertolucci's burgeoning lyricism and cinematic confidence clash with the fragmented, highly declarative style of Godard's more political films.

Filmography:
La commare secca (1962)
Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1962)
La via del petrolio (1965)
Il Canale (1966)
Partner (1968)
Amore e rabbia (1969, episode "il Fico Infruttuoso")
La strategia del ragno (Spider's Stratagem, 1970)
Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970)
Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1973)
1900 (Novecento, 1976)
La Luna (Luna, 1979)
La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (1981)
L'ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1987)
The Sheltering Sky, (1990)
Little Buddha (1993)
Stealing Beauty (Io ballo da sola, 1996)
Besieged (1998)
Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002)
The Dreamers (2003).