No Wonder It's Bad

James Berardinelly does not like the movie Silk:

By any standards, Silk is a bad movie: pretentious, stillborn, devoid of emotion. It’s a perfect example of how awful direction and performances can ruin an adequate screenplay. Granted, what’s on paper isn’t perfect and it contains a number of ripe lines of dialogue, but the way it is butchered by director François Girard is shocking. There’s very little that this movie does
right;[...]

And reading further I discovered why:

Based on the novel by Alessandro Baricco, Silk introduces Herve Joncour (Michael Pitt), a young man who takes a commission to buy silkworm eggs from Japan so the local silk mill owner (Alfred Molina) can stay in business.

I tried to read that book (but only managed to skim through it) and I can attest it's utterly godawful. It is a grandiose example of pretentious intellectualoid writing, of form over substance - to the point the only thing I inferred was that a guy went back and forth to Japan trying to take back silkworms (or their eggs). It is repetitive and full of vane grandeur; it is not written to tell a story, but to show off how good the author is (supposed to be).

Couple it with an intellectual French director and you cannot get anything good.