Besieged

Bertolucci made this on a small scale for Italian television and chose to tell it almost without speech: fifteen minutes pass before the first line. Shandurai is a refugee from Africa. She is studying medicine in Rome and pays her way as a live-in cleaner for Kinsky, an English composer and pianist. Kinsky falls in love with her. What she wants is the release of her husband, a political prisoner at home, and Kinsky is the only person who could arrange it. The film does not try to resolve that inequality. It builds the distance between them not through dialogue but through the floors of the house: she works below, he plays piano above, and the music becomes the only channel between them. Classical piano carries the film. Thandiwe Newton and David Thewlis star. Who it is for: viewers who like small-scale love stories told through image and music rather than speech. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the film to interrogate the power balance. It touches the possibility of exploitation and does not press it, and leaves the ending deliberately ambiguous.