A rock star, a soccer player, a feudal warrior, and a post-‘Chocolat’ Alfred Molina walk into a bar… stop me if you’ve heard this one…
Silk, an Alessandro Baricco novel whose rights for the movie were acquired by Picturehouse and New Line. It tells the story of Herve Joncour, a 19th Century France married silkworm smuggler who travels to Japan to procure his surreptitious cargo. He begins a torrid love affair with a European woman, a concubine of a local baron, with whom he becomes obsessed. Without speaking the same language they communicate through letters, and even through the war their unrequited passion endures, and then the fit hits the proverbial shan as Herve’s wife becomes suspicious.
The film will star a melting pot cast including Michael Pitt (Last Days), Keira Knightley (Pride & Prejudice), Koji Yakusho (Memoirs of a Geisha), and Alfred Molina (Raiders of the Lost Ark… you know the guy, ‘Satipo’… “Throw me Idol, I’ll throw you the whip”… traitor scum…).
Now the last time I was in Japan for smuggling silkworm I also had a torrid love affair with a concubine… and by “concubine” I mean “Japanese hostess”… and by “Japanese hostess” I mean “slovenly dirty sailor”… but I treated him as my equal, my sweet little froth-mouthed concubine… (Oh Toshiro, where did we ever go wrong?…oh, right, your rusty hook gave me syphilis…)
