The past twenty years have witnessed a gradual globalization of the movies, which has mainly taken the form of Hollywood gobbling up all of the eccentric, individual national cinemas that once made up the rich fabric of the art. Clearly, the global march of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and the rest of the Hollywood action figures (Joe Dante's Small Soldiers provides a nice visual metaphor) has succeeded in wiping out most of the popular cinema in its few remaining strongholds. The genre cinema in Europe is long gone, Asia is crumbling fast, and even India, long protected by its maze of dialects and cultural peculiarities, is said to be teetering on the brink, ready to surrender the tattered beauties of Hollywood to the seamless digital dreams of Spielberg, Lucas, and company.

But Hollywood, more insidiously perhaps, has also managed to put its stamp on the art cinema. The Oscar model of the well-mounted historical/literary epic, as pioneered in the Thirties by Irving Thalberg and never really improved upon, has become the template of the international auteur film, designed for a world market but with an American sale foremost in mind. The Swedes have gone from the avant-garde obscurities of Persona to the miniseries aesthetic of Best Intentions, the Italians from the existential musings of Antonioni to the sentimental pandering of Benigni, and the French—while continuing to produce a wide range of distinctive, innovative films for domestic consumption—are represented internationally chiefly by overstuffed period pieces like Horseman on the Roof and Jean de Florette.

Perhaps no director has suffered more from internationalization than Bernardo Bertolucci—and perhaps no director has been quicker to embrace it. Within a breathtakingly short period, Bertolucci transformed himself from an edgy sexual-political provocateur into a David Lean manque.

Bertolucci first tasted the fruit of internationalism by casting Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris (73), then made a meal of it with the far-flung participants of 1900 (76), raiding equally French, American, and Italian sources. But the transitional moment occurs in 1987's The Last Emperor. A gorgeous opening sequence depicts the childhood of the future emperor, spinning poetic patterns of moons and motherly love that spring from the heart of Bertolucci's sensibility. But mystery and lyricism soon disappear, giving way to a painterly appreciation of crowd scenes and landscapes devoid of any identifiable personal slant. Introspection yields to spectacle, and art yields to industry.

In the Nineties, Bertolucci has become an exile, in retreat from Italy and in retreat from his own past. The concern with family and history that runs through Before the Revolution, The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist, 1900, Luna, and Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man gives way to the rootlessness and academicism of The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, and Stealing Beauty—the last a film set in Italy that couldn't be more touristic.

In this context, Besieged looks like a triumphant homecoming, and it is certainly Bertolucci's most personal film in a decade. It's also his smallest in 28 years, a television movie that marks a return to the compact format and reduced production values of Spider's Stratagem. This is not a coincidence. Shucking off the apparatus of international coproduction, Bertolucci seems to have rediscovered himself.

Besieged is set in Rome, though it is emphatically not a tourist's city. (One of the film's most effective visual strategies, in fact, is its gradual revelation that the action takes place within spitting distance of the Spanish Steps, one of Rome's most popular tourist attractions.) In an old house, located up a narrow street near the mouth of a subway station, lives Kinsky (David Thewlis), a painfully introverted pianist who inherited the building—along with its impressive collection of art and antiquities—from a benevolent aunt. The building's only other resident is Shandurai (Thandie Newton), a young African woman who, fleeing repression in her (unnamed) home country, has come to Rome to study medicine; work as Kinsky's housekeeper provides her with money and a basement room.

Shandurai and Kinsky are both exiles, she for political reasons (her husband, a schoolteacher, has been thrown in prison), he for personal ones—the weight of the world seems simply to be too much for him. But in his isolation (something about Thewlis's jittery, stiff-legged manner suggests Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates) he has fallen in love with this stranger from a strange land, and is compelled to blurt out his feelings for her. Frightened, she pulls back, and he is left to ask, pitifully, what will make her love him. “Get my husband out of prison,” she angrily responds, sure that she is demanding the impossible.

Working with a new cinematographer, Fabio Cianchetti, Bertolucci backs away from the painterly lighting and formal, widescreen compositions that defined his longtime collaboration with Vittorio Storaro; this is a more spontaneous-seeming film, with a free and easy use of the hand-held camera and a much tighter visual field than Bertolucci generally uses. Yet his superb sense of space has not diminished. Besieged is composed in vertical movements, in ascents and descents centered around the building's central spiral staircase and the dumbwaiter that connects Shandurai's room to Kinsky's study. The building comes to seem an organic creature, with Kinsky's space as its head and Shandurai as its heart.

The up and down movements—Kinsky likes to communicate with Shandurai by placing enigmatic objects in the dumb-waiter—also acquire a psychological dimension. Downward and inward movements are associated with dream sequences, in which Shandurai revisits and reinterprets her life in Africa. The downward movements are movements into the past (the first dream fills in the story background, showing Shandurai working in a children's hospital and her husband's arrest), with sexuality (one orgasmic dream, which Bertolucci chooses not to share), and with the subconscious (Shandurai dreams that Kinsky's face has replaced that of the repressive dictator on the wall posters of her hometown).

Of course, such up-and-down metaphors are not without their ideological implications, particularly when they involve cultural contrasts. Bertolucci came in for his share of criticism when Besieged premiered at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival, where several of our finest critics saw the film as a nostalgic endorsement of colonialism. Kinsky, whose curio-packed home suggests some kind of storehouse of Western civilization, is seen extending a paternalistic hand toward the disadvantaged African, offering to swap his abundant knowledge for her childlike innocence and “primitive” sexuality.

But that reading requires stopping the film halfway through. Once Shandurai throws down her challenge—return my husband to me and I'll learn to love you—Kinsky speaks of his feelings no more. But objects begin to disappear from the house—little knickknacks at first, then paintings and sculptures and entire wall tapestries—as it gradually dawns on Shandurai (and the audience) that Kinsky is selling off his possessions in order to finance his attempts to free her husband. For Bertolucci, there is an uncharacteristic bit of Catholic mysticism here (though perhaps this is the point where Christian sacrifice meets Buddhist resignation). “He who tries to save his life will lose it,” a priest tells Kinsky; “he who gives it away will be saved.”

In the film's second half, the metaphor shifts from space to light. Previously, we've seen Shandurai plunging into the dark tunnel of the subway entrance, on her way to her university classes. After she learns she's passed her exams, Bertolucci reverses the movement, following Shandurai out of the subway into the blinding sunlight. The shadowy interior of the house gradually lightens and clarifies as the objects that encumber it disappear.

The first sign of Shandurai's evolving affections comes when she sees the light of an open window playing on the hairs of Kinsky's ankle as he lies reading; in the sunlight, the threatening figure is revealed as boyish, vulnerable. And in the film's most lyrical passage, Shandurai finds a crumpled airmail envelope in her employer's garbage—the first solid sign that he is in contact with her home country—and runs with it up to the terrace on the roof of the building, where the household sheets are drying on a line. The fluttering fields of white and the bright Roman sun combine to create a blinding radiance—surely one of the most vivid images of sheer happiness ever recorded on film.

It's significant that Bertolucci equates joy with blankness, liberation with empty spaces. Besieged marks Bertolucci's return to Italy, but he seems to have come home only better to shuck it off. In this Italian film, the two principal characters are an Englishman and an African; the one Italian figure of any consequence, Shandurai's classmate Agostino (Claudio Santamaria), prefers to speak English himself. In part, this is Bertolucci's canny concession to the world market (an English-track film has a far better chance of attracting distribution), but there is something willful there as well. Kinsky has chosen to sacrifice his culture and history for the sake of love; Shandurai will have to face this choice herself, at the film's ambiguous conclusion. Bertolucci ranges himself with them; for the sake of his art, he has made himself a citizen of nowhere.

This slim, beautiful film, which is about the necessity of sacrifice and paring down, is itself an act of reduction—a clearing of the decks, a return to zero. Where Bertolucci's characters were once united by their unexpressed desire to return to the warmth and security of childhood, to the love of a mother and the safety of a womb, they now define themselves by their denial of the past and their passionate embrace of the present. A new, more mature Bertolucci seems to have emerged from the emptiness of the Oscar years, an artist no longer drawn by nostalgia but compelled by a risky, uncertain future—the future that lies beyond the front door of Kinsky's house, up the Spanish Steps.