Besieged: not a love story [Commentary on film Besieged by Bernardo Bertolucci]
106.3Abstract (summary)
As a sign of Shandurai's vulnerability and lack of privacy, her closet is a dumbwaiter, on cords (like his chords?) that [Kinsky] controls. His rumbling use of it awakens her. She feels assaulted by this helplessness and exposure even/especially when he uses this power to send her a gift. The first, a sheet of his music manuscript page bearing a dark green question mark, renders Kinsky's entire enterprise questionable. Unable either to deal with this or to dismiss it, she stashes it in her suitcase of souvenirs, with her photos of Winston. The gifts grow more intimate and coercive: a red African flower, his aunt's heirloom ring. Kinsky penetrates her closet with his unwanted intimacy. What Shandurai needs as a stable, constant space for her sad possessions, Kinsky has the power to raise, to lower, and to deploy to enter her life. "No, it is my cupboard," she shouts indignantly up into the darkness. Unsurprisingly, in her dreams Kinsky's face supplants the African tyrant's on the ubiquitous propaganda posters.
A footnote. This gap is also imaged in the recurring shots of feet and legs, signs of the characters' foundation, their stability and their connection to their world. The singing storyteller materializes barefoot out of the dust of the arresting soldiers' trucks. His audience of African boys hang barefoot in the trees, as natural as fruit. In contrast, the military police wear uniform boots. In her first scenes Shandurai is seen working with legless and crippled children. One camera shot pans across the dictator's posters until our eyes come to rest on a pile of shoes, emblematic of a natural creature shod and protection either lost or imposed. At Winston's arrest [Bernardo Bertolucci] shows Shandurai's urine winding down her legs into her shoes. In Kinsky's flat, when Shandurai crawls under his bed to retrieve his wayward black shoe, she sees him enter in his slippers, stand there imperially, then leave without a word. Shandurai dons big black boots when she is ready to go party with her friend, but scrubbing Kinsky's floors she reverts to bare feet. At day's end, one of her meagre luxuries is to remove her shoes and rub her bare feet. Bertolucci measures the distance between Shandurai's two worlds when he cuts from the beer-foam of the party to the soapsuds on the floor. (This bathos anticipates the morning-after scene at the end of the him, where there is no hope of such cleansing.) As she makes her way to Kinsky's bed in the film's final frames, Bertolucci emphasizes her barefoot walk across red stone floors that seem to parody the red clay of her homeland. These foot-scenes define a spectrum of sentience, from the numb, clenched Kinsky and the brutal army to the open, vulnerable African civilian.
The contractual conclusion is hardly romantic. On the eve of her husband's return both Shandurai and Kinsky celebrate by getting drunk, he with someone who helped him, she alone with the champagne she bought to drink with Winston. She first tries to repay Kinsky by writing him a letter. But even a page full of freeform thank yous feels inadequate. Whether she has fallen in love with Kinsky or merely feels she must honour their agreement does not matter. Her saviour has manoeuvred her into his thrall. Finally, she writes "Dear Mr Kinsky. I love you." Before she can take that note to his bed, she drinks herself to sleep, then awakens in self-generated tumescence. When she goes to Kinsky, the act of ostensible love begins with her gently removing the drunk, snoring man's shoes. She is still the servant, not a lover.
Bernardo Bertolucci's seventeenth film, Besieged, masterfully exposes the self-interest behind the illusion of generosity and the insularity beneath the illusion of internationalization. The brilliant Marxist director of The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, and 1900 once again fleshes out hard-headed political thinking in life and blood drama. This is a story about unspecified nations even as it is about people. Bertolucci proves that politics and philosophy continually affect the viscera of one's quotidian life. Though it appears to be a love story, Besieged analyzes two peoples' paralysis by the class and economic hegemony. Beneath the romantic pretence here beats a destructive, exploitative selfishness, because both principals are victimized by their social station. What is this thing called "love"?
IN Besieged - or, more properly, by its Italian title, L'assedio, The Siege - Bertolucci deploys the classic conflict of a romantic triangle. A British pianist/composer, Mr Kinsky (David Thewlis), lives in an opulent flat in Rome that he has inherited from a wealthy aunt. He becomes obsessed with Shandurai (Thandie Newton), the beautiful African woman who cleans his flat in exchange for modest living quarters. A medical student, she has fled her unnamed African homeland to escape the brutal dictatorship that imprisoned her husband Winston (Paul Osul). He's a schoolteacher jailed for irreverence beyond the call of pedagogic duty. With nary a word of conversation or mutual discovery, Kinsky becomes infatuated with the beautiful black woman. In a spontaneous outburst they forge a strange bond:
Kinsky: Marry me! I'll do anything to make you love me! ... What do I have to do to make you love me? Shandurai: You get my husband - out of jail!
He does, selling off all his prized possessions to fund his campaign. On the eve of her husband's arrival the woman goes to bed with her landlord. She is still lying there when her freed husband arrives, unknowingly burdened now by more than his suitcases.
To the familiar triangle Bertolucci adds the striking theme of present absence. Between the scene of Winston's arrest and his return we don't see him, save for the fleeting glimpse of his photos in Shandurai's hope chest. Yet his absence is arguably the strongest force in Shandurai's life. Though her love for her spouse helps her resist Kinsky's lurking courtship, her gratitude for Winston's freedom and the pressure of her thoughtless contract with the pianist compel her infidelity.
The absent Winston fades before the unspoken power of his present rival. Kinsky never tells Shandurai that he is working avidly to meet her terms for loving him. As he does not work with her, he is not really working for her. His desire is the film's primary siege. His courtship is a cold application of his power and financial resources, albeit limited. The tense civil war imaged in the film's opening scenes defines the domestic siege in Rome. As the furtive Kinsky connives to impose his love, he seems a more subtle version of the "boss" that Winston distinguishes from the "leader" for his students just before his arrest. To demonstrate the "boss" he struts about in an arrogant, puffed-up manner. Kinsky expresses tyranny more subtly. His private design, ostensibly a lavish sacrifice for his beloved, is rather her ensnarement. Shandurai first learns of his "help" when she finds a letter crumpled in his garbage. Kinsky's service to her, however devoutly desired, is destructive, invasive, and self-serving. Her ostensible saviour is her oppressor. His mysterious classical music fills her room unless she drowns it out with her own African recordings.
As a sign of Shandurai's vulnerability and lack of privacy, her closet is a dumbwaiter, on cords (like his chords?) that Kinsky controls. His rumbling use of it awakens her. She feels assaulted by this helplessness and exposure even/especially when he uses this power to send her a gift. The first, a sheet of his music manuscript page bearing a dark green question mark, renders Kinsky's entire enterprise questionable. Unable either to deal with this or to dismiss it, she stashes it in her suitcase of souvenirs, with her photos of Winston. The gifts grow more intimate and coercive: a red African flower, his aunt's heirloom ring. Kinsky penetrates her closet with his unwanted intimacy. What Shandurai needs as a stable, constant space for her sad possessions, Kinsky has the power to raise, to lower, and to deploy to enter her life. "No, it is my cupboard," she shouts indignantly up into the darkness. Unsurprisingly, in her dreams Kinsky's face supplants the African tyrant's on the ubiquitous propaganda posters.
The characters' names are suggestive. With its exotic sound and its faint association with the poverty and isolation of the shanty, "Shandurai" confirms the heroine's difference and enigma. From an envelope we learn that Mr Kinsky's Christian name is Jason - the classical European quester who recovered his kingdom from his uncle by retrieving the Golden Fleece, with the help of the sorceress Medea, whom he married and later - to horrendous revenge - abandoned. The name suggests Kinsky's dependence upon the exotic woman. But this allusion does not fit Shandurai: that is, the Westerner distorts and colonizes the Other. Otherwise "Kinsky" rings a little more than kin and less than kind.
As Shandurai always call him Mr Kinsky, even after his proposal, the name recalls Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a rather more impressive European musician enchanted by the African. More pertinent, perhaps, is T.S. Eliot's epigraph for The Hollow Men, "Mistah Kurtz, he dead." For in his emotional inhibition Kinsky is a hollow man, "Paralyzed force, gesture without motion." As in the poem, the two central figures "grope together And avoid speech." Between Kinsky's motion and the act, between his emotion and the response, the desire and the spasm, the potency and the existence, falls the shadow of his selfish design. Indeed the Hollow Men allusion explains the pertinence of the film's first shot: the African desert. Like the political siege, the desert shots are metaphors for Shandurai's Roman experience.
BOTH central figures are strangers in a strange land. Shandurai finds community in an African market and with a gay student (Claudio Santamaria) in her medical class. But despite her demonstrated ease in Italian (she passes her medical exam in that language), she remains an isolated alien. A refugee from the civil tensions in her homeland, she concentrates on her medical studies in Rome - except for serving her landlord. Kinsky has a more secure economic and cultural position but is isolated by his own eccentric nature. He is socially inept, reclusive, furtive, homely, with no life apart from the piano. As an artist who fears public performance, he is characterized as a man of limited and compromised effectiveness, isolated, incomplete, fragile. To bolster his own legitimacy, he cites Vladimir Horowitz's retirement from performance because he feared his fingers were made of breakable glass. As a man and as a pianist Kinsky is "just not good enough" to perform openly.
The "few friends" Kinsky invites to hear his new composition are the children he teaches, who variously are distracted or lulled to sleep by his performance. Only when he goes into the garden to juggle for them does he connect to them - a more shallow harmony than the one we saw in Winston's classroom. Otherwise Kinsky has no friends. No one ever calls him by his first name. The only other adults we see him talk with are his associates in his campaign to free Winston and the man with whom he negotiates the sale of his precious Steinway. He engages in no meaningful conversation with Shandurai about her life, her Africa, her hopes and needs, or her husband. As a result, what he does ostensibly for her is rather more to her, against her.
As all the film's reviewers have noted, the story is remarkably short on dialogue. Much of that spareness is in untranslated African or Italian. This is the world of new globalization, of borders easily crossed and the gulfs of morality and understanding that persist beneath them. As well, the effect is another form of present absence. The language expresses something but - unless we understand the Italian and African - we don't know what it is. This film's meaning is usually conveyed by the unspoken, whether visual or gestural or musical. Bertolucci makes us dig out the meaning beyond the surface he shows. In a film of such deliberately concealed revelations, of indirect implications and deceptive surfaces, we can hardly take Kinsky's "sacrifice" at face value - any more than we can the American military sacrifices for Kuwait, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia.
As one example of this disjunctive signification, when Winston is arrested, we see but we don't hear Shandurai's shouts and cries. That is, even her outburst suggests suppression. The Western filmmaker shows the silencing of the black woman's pain. When Bertolucci begins the film with an African musician/storyteller (J.C. Ojwang), he centres the film on Shandurai. The song also evokes the tradition of the ballad - a simple story of stark passions, for all times and places. By not translating the song, he makes us guess its meaning at the most general level - an expression of remote Africa (repeatedly named in the chorus) - but keeps us locked within the Westerner's (i.e., Kinsky's) unfamiliarity. Shandurai's unwitting contract with Kinsky is also in the tradition of the ballad or the fairy tale: a spontaneous phrase becomes a mortal commitment.
As in the ballad or fable, Bertolucci disrupts the narrative with ellipses. Some are between scenes, as when Shandurai awakens in what turns out to be Rome when we've had no indication that she has left Africa. Kinsky's decision to sell his possessions is first suggested when he photographs them. Their climactic love-making is only implied in the contrast between their lying dressed in bed and their awakening nude: a searing absent presence. Other ellipses are within scenes: the jump-cut editing which fragments Shandurai's vision of the red flower gift, her dreary housecleaning, his composing, Kinsky's absurd chase of Shandurai and his frenetic conclusion of his party for his students. By interjecting new rhythms Bertolucci disrupts the apparent naturalism, confirms his film's fabular formality, and reminds us not to believe his surface.
The attraction between the Brit and the African is clearly not based on any understanding, such as might come from conversation and articulated mutual discovery. Instead they appear to respond to each other's physical difference. In Kinsky's first appearance, when he looks down on his departing black maid, Bertolucci holds on Kinsky's bright white hands in the shadow. Shandurai's reluctant reciprocation is eased by epiphanic moments, such as sunlight falling on the gleaming patch of white skin between the sleeping man's pant-cuff and sock. Bertolucci shows them stealing glimpses at each other. At first, while ironing, Shandurai shoots steam at him, as if to repel his gaze. But she comes to accept and to return it, especially when warmed by his apparent "sacrifice."
Bertolucci usually poses Kinsky above Shandurai - unless she is at work for him, when the activity denotes his dominance. There are parallel scenes on the staircase, with Kinsky at the superior height before his proposal and Shandurai more awkwardly at that advantage after, when she drops her dustcloth on his head. The characters are never at a level of comfort. "I don't understand you. I don't understand this music, hey?" she tells him, closing with her own cultural inflection. Kinsky is so naive about her and her world that he ridiculously offers to go live in Africa with her:
Kinsky: I'll go anywhere with you. We could go to Africa.
Shandurai: What do you know about Africa?....
Kinsky: Please. Love me.
Their attraction by their difference is more than a matter of erotic exoticism. Rather, their only connection is the historic and ineluctable abyss between them - cultural, economic, political. Though they live in the same space they climb separate, parallel staircases to their respective rooms.
A footnote. This gap is also imaged in the recurring shots of feet and legs, signs of the characters' foundation, their stability and their connection to their world. The singing storyteller materializes barefoot out of the dust of the arresting soldiers' trucks. His audience of African boys hang barefoot in the trees, as natural as fruit. In contrast, the military police wear uniform boots. In her first scenes Shandurai is seen working with legless and crippled children. One camera shot pans across the dictator's posters until our eyes come to rest on a pile of shoes, emblematic of a natural creature shod and protection either lost or imposed. At Winston's arrest Bertolucci shows Shandurai's urine winding down her legs into her shoes. In Kinsky's flat, when Shandurai crawls under his bed to retrieve his wayward black shoe, she sees him enter in his slippers, stand there imperially, then leave without a word. Shandurai dons big black boots when she is ready to go party with her friend, but scrubbing Kinsky's floors she reverts to bare feet. At day's end, one of her meagre luxuries is to remove her shoes and rub her bare feet. Bertolucci measures the distance between Shandurai's two worlds when he cuts from the beer-foam of the party to the soapsuds on the floor. (This bathos anticipates the morning-after scene at the end of the him, where there is no hope of such cleansing.) As she makes her way to Kinsky's bed in the film's final frames, Bertolucci emphasizes her barefoot walk across red stone floors that seem to parody the red clay of her homeland. These foot-scenes define a spectrum of sentience, from the numb, clenched Kinsky and the brutal army to the open, vulnerable African civilian.
BERTOLUCCI'S point is that this historical abyss is so profound that it cannot be crossed, even with the best will in the world. In his attempt to bridge the gap, Kinsky drapes an African cloth over his grand piano and adds an African quilt to his bed. When Shandurai brings her note we see he has a kitsch African lamp beside his bed. That is, Kinsky's embrace of the Other is shallow. Even his attempt to absorb African rhythms into his new composition signifies arrogant appropriation more than respect or cultural outreach. He is not listening to the African but presuming to speak like/for it. When he asks Shandurai to help at his premiere his self-deprecation condescends towards the African material: "You'll probably find it - rather trivial." (Still - that erotic exoticism again - his stubbornly rhythmic piece apparently rivets the one long-haired blonde among his students.) Kinsky's playing is so self-obsessed that he persists even after no one is left listening. Like his good deed, his music primarily serves himself. This musician is not attuned to others.
As Kinsky sacrifices his possessions - first his art, then his furniture, and ultimately his grand piano - to finance his campaign to free the woman's husband, he seems to be generously spending for his love. But in its historical situation this sacrifice is another imposition of power against the oppressed. For, despite Kinsky's personal alienation and the shaky basis of his economic security, as a white European male who had a rich aunt Kinsky enjoys inherited power over the black woman. He is the privileged expatriate. The tattered old tapestry he sells off is worth more than all her goods. (This is the domestic story of have and have-not nations.) There's an implicit smugness, not a lover's modesty, in his liquidation - since, in effect, it is done so that he may buy her:
Shandurai: Not much to dust, no?
Kinsky (smiling): Yes, I know.
(He returns to his notation.)
Kinsky's "sacrifice" is rather a droit de seigneur that he imposes upon her. He divests himself of his goods in order to truly empower himself over Shandurai, not simply to help her. Again: he doesn't tell her he is working to win her husband's freedom, nor what he is doing, nor how it is progressing. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were married" are his last words on the subject. As if to confirm that the issue is their inequality, Shandurai lacks the courage even to ask him about the envelope she found or if he is responsible for her husband's imminent freedom. But Kinsky knows. As she clutches Winston's message, Kinsky smiles with new confidence as he walks past her to juggle his fruit for his students.
Kinsky does not even hint that Shandurai must hold up her end of their bargain - because he doesn't have to. Again, his apparent generosity conceals a force that is not just corrupt but depraved. He need only wait for her to present herself. When proposing, Kinsky stretches across his keyboard, drawing confidence from the instrument of his culture and power; he would embrace her in the same possessive imperialism. Shandurai tries to escape to another lodging but can't. When she tells him that her husband is about to arrive, she seems compelled to reaffirm his value: "He's a brave man, you know. A good man. I respect him very much." She seems to be fending Kinsky off with this testimony for the man he saved. Kinsky responds with a smile, plays with the soccer ball until she leaves, then impatiently kicks it away, no longer willing to pretend disinterest.
Of course, Kinsky's power is itself illusory. It's not based on his substance but on the inhumanity of the political context. Kinsky's claim to love the woman rather glosses the imperialist's compulsion to subjugate, to exploit and to possess her. His self-interest drains his service to his servant of any generosity. It makes his shucking of his goods less loving than neurotic, self-destructive compulsion. This is not a love story because a world of political gulfs does not allow for love to reach across them.
In Shandurai's Africa, the billboard that promises "Trust for maximum protection" apparently extols a particular brand of condom. It's a taunting reminder of the lack of trust and protection both in the African country's tyrannical government and in Shandurai's later relationship with her shelterer, Kinsky. The pianist attends a sermon delivered by a black minister in which the clergyman suggests that in this age of a new Sodom and Gomorrah, "Anyone who tries to preserve his life will lose it. Anyone who prepares to lose it will be kept safe." This call for a new moral and political order suggests to Kinsky the strategy of gaining by giving away.
In this light, perhaps the film's title points to a more complex siege than Kinsky's romantic assault of his black maid. Kinsky may be as besieged by her as she is by him. His fascination with her may derive from his own sense of his fragility, weakness, inhibited sensuality. The brilliance of casting David Thewlis lies not just in his performance skills but in the dissolute sensualism suggested by his hangdog face and thick lips and the persona he carries from his major earlier works, most notably Naked. Where one reviewer complained that the "too doughy, dopey and effete" Thewlis was miscast, that register may be precisely Bertolucci's point. The actor doesn't look like an appropriate lover for this woman because he isn't. As Kinsky can't bring himself to perform before an adult audience, he must seek romance (and its subordinate components, love and sex) in someone over whom he has a power advantage. And his beautiful black maid is the only one who can play this role of vulnerability for him-her new medical degree notwithstanding. In another situation perhaps she might have loved him for what he did for her, and he might have learned and loved what she is. But in this politically fragmented world that is impossible.
The contractual conclusion is hardly romantic. On the eve of her husband's return both Shandurai and Kinsky celebrate by getting drunk, he with someone who helped him, she alone with the champagne she bought to drink with Winston. She first tries to repay Kinsky by writing him a letter. But even a page full of freeform thank yous feels inadequate. Whether she has fallen in love with Kinsky or merely feels she must honour their agreement does not matter. Her saviour has manoeuvred her into his thrall. Finally, she writes "Dear Mr Kinsky. I love you." Before she can take that note to his bed, she drinks herself to sleep, then awakens in self-generated tumescence. When she goes to Kinsky, the act of ostensible love begins with her gently removing the drunk, snoring man's shoes. She is still the servant, not a lover.
Any possibility of genuine love in that sweated bed is denied the morning after. As her husband rings the doorbell downstairs, Shandurai lies awake beside the sleeping Kinsky, her eyes wide open as if confronting her betrayal. She is pinned down by the large, white arm across her chest. As she looks away, she caresses the arm, clutches it, then abruptly moves it away. These gestures suggest her subjugation. A visibly agitated Shandurai leaves the bed. On the eve of her husband's return to her she has befouled herself as helplessly as she did at his arrest. The dawn exposes the imperialist oppression that undermines the illusion of individual freedom, in all three corners of that ostensibly romantic triangle. For in a hegemony even the best impulses are compromised.
THIS is the way the film ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Bertolucci's last image is openended. Having futilely rung the doorbell several times, Winston picks up his bags as if to leave. Whether he goes or not, whether his wife comes down to him or not, we are not shown because it does not matter. The beautiful African woman and her homely European "lover" have ineradicably spoiled both her marriage and their own potentially helpful and respectful relationship. The gulf between them - personal, social, cultural, political - turned even their most generous actions destructive. Shandurai's and Winston's genuine love has been undermined by Kinsky's pseudo-romantic siege. This is a tragedy of destructive compulsions, not a love story, and its characters evoke the players on the new global world order - some with needs, some with power, but with an unbridgeable gap between them.
MAURICE YACOWAR is Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Calgary. His first novel, The Bold Testament, will be published by Bayeux Arts in the fall.
Word count: 3760
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Fall 1999
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