“Silk” is an empty movie. Director François Girard has made a movie filled with stunningly beautiful women, breathtaking landscapes, and dramatic travel adventure, but for what purposes? There’s sex and there’s death, but the film seems to offer no explanation for either—especially as to why two women as magnificent as Keira Knightley and Sei Ashina would fall in love with a crazy monkey like Michael Pitt.

Pitt plays the young Hervé Joncour who falls in love with Hélène (Knightley) while on leave from the army. Hélène sticks a flower in his mouth, suddenly they’re married, and then he’s off to Egypt and Japan to get silkworm eggs for a kooky businessman who’s new in town. During his first trip to Japan, the weary traveler has an incredibly sensuous, erotic encounter over a tea ceremony with his trade partner’s wife or perhaps daughter, who writes him a mysterious note he cannot actually read to entice him to return soon.

Back home his wife is having trouble conceiving, and he has trouble forgetting the exotic Japanese beauty at the other end of the world. He takes more trips to Japan, perhaps for the worms, perhaps for the woman, but by his last trip his relationship with the traders has turned sour. Hélène falls sick and dies of some enigmatic unaccountable disease, but first writes a very beautiful poem to her husband and has it translated into Japanese so that he will believe it to be from the other woman.

While the film is beautiful to look at, the characters are so unconvincing that there’s no electricity or passion. The dialogue is thin, and apart from the poem there are no words with any lasting power in the entire film. By the end, you’re more likely to remember the nipples than anything else.