With Besieged - a modestly scaled chamber piece which originated as a one-hour project for Italian television - Bernardo Bertolucci retreats from the pomp and ceremony of his big-budget exotic epics and goes full circle, back to his roots in low-budget, issues-driven drama back in the 1960s. Unfortunately, Besieged utterly pales on every level in comparison with the director's finest earlier films such as The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist.

A slight and sketchy exercise, Besieged begins in an unnamed African country where a young woman named Shandurai wets herself in fear as her husband is arrested by the oppressive regime. Moving to Rome to study medicine, she is hired as a cleaner by her landlord, the reclusive and would-be enigmatic Mr Kinsky, a pianist whose life is his music - until he becomes drawn irresistibly to her.

The theme of romantic obsession is a recurring one in the cinema of Bernardo Bertolucci, but only in the wretched Stealing Beauty has he treated it with more shallowness than in Besieged, a rambling, tedious and underdeveloped exercise which ultimately proves insubstantial - and even rather silly. The earnest efforts of its two principal actors, Thandie Newton and David Thewlis, are defeated by such simplistic and pretentious material.