The film opens in an unnamed African town where Shandurai (Thandiwe Newton) watches with distress as a school teacher is taken away by police.

In Rome, Shandurai is now a housemaid for Jason Kinsky (David Thewlis), an eccentric English pianist and composer, and is also a promising medical student.

It nonetheless remained a low-budget film with a small crew and a brisk shooting schedule of 20-25 scenes each day, roughly four times the director's usual pace.

[2] The short story differed from the screen play in three significant ways: it was set in London, not Rome; the woman came from Latin America, not Africa; and Kinsky was depicted as fat and much older than he was in the film.

As Bertolucci and Peploe first encountered it, the villa was as depicted at the end of the film, a largely unfurnished home with bare walls and an overgrown garden.

But the home met the director's criteria for a spiral staircase, and Bertolucci liked the exterior for its two contrasting facades, one overlooking a narrow street leading to a subway station, the other adjacent to the Spanish Steps.

[4] Stephen Holden in the New York Times found the film's minimal dialogue a refreshing departure in what he termed the age of television psychobabble.

Filled with rich, glinting images of the world imagined as a confusingly lovely mosaic, the movie has one of the sparsest screenplays of any film released this year.

For the feelings that this love story examines are built up more through music than through talking, and through mysterious deeds, carried out by one character and observed by the other, that don't seem to add up.

"[5] Roger Ebert's reaction was almost the polar opposite, calling the film "a movie about whether two people with nothing in common, who have no meaningful conversations, will have sex--even if that means dismissing everything we have learned about the woman.

"[6] Despite dissimilar themes, the 2002 film City of God, which depicts gangs in Rio de Janeiro, drew inspiration from Besieged.