Besieged

Besieged is a 1998 drama directed by Bernardo Bertolucci from a screenplay he wrote with Clare Peploe. It follows Shandurai, an African woman living in exile in Rome after her husband is imprisoned by the dictatorship in her country. She supports herself by studying medicine and keeping house for Jason Kinsky, an eccentric English pianist and composer who lives alone in a large Roman residence, absorbed in his music. Their arrangement becomes complicated when he falls in love with her, and she tells him she will only respond to him if he helps free her husband. He begins selling off his possessions to do so, while the gap between their backgrounds and political experiences shapes what happens between them.

Thandiwe Newton and David Thewlis lead the cast, with Claudio Santamaria, John C. Ojwang, Massimo De Rossi and Veronica Lazăr in supporting roles. The film was a British and Italian co-production from BBC Film, Fine Line Features, Fiction Films and Mediaset, running 93 minutes. It arrived between Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers, the tenth of the twelve features credited to Bertolucci in the facts, and followed his earlier work including The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor and Little Buddha.

On IMDb it holds a 7.1 rating from 49 reviews, while on TMDB it stands at 6.7 from 67 votes, so critics rated it somewhat higher than the smaller audience sample did.