Besieged

Besieged (L'assedio, 1998) — watch online on iFILM — is Bernardo Bertolucci's intimate drama shot almost entirely inside a single Roman villa. The cast is minimal: Thandie Newton, David Thewlis, and little else besides silence and music.

Shandurai has fled an unnamed African country after the government imprisoned her husband. In Rome she hires herself out as a housekeeper to Mr. Kinsky, an English pianist who lives surrounded by Bach and Grieg and barely notices the world outside his music room. He falls in love with her. Then, without announcement, he begins selling off everything he owns — paintings, furniture, the piano itself — to raise whatever it takes to buy her husband's freedom.

The film runs on silence and implication rather than plot. Newton carries scene after scene with almost no dialogue, and the restraint is precisely the point: Bertolucci strips the love story down to its most uncomfortable, least explainable form. Stream Besieged (1998) online on iFILM.