Besieged - Not a Love Story‪.‬

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 Spiders 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: