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So does Bernardo Bertolucci's tonic and tender new picture, "Besieged" -- and Bertolucci himself has rightly, proudly noted that much of the credit should go to Peploe, his wife, who found the original story (James Lasdun's "The Siege"), co-wrote the adaptation and consulted daily on the filmmaking. (She's listed as co-writer and associate producer.) With a unique, plangent irony, the movie charts the growing bond between an African political exile (Thandie Newton) working as a housekeeper in Rome and her employer, a reclusive British composer and pianist (David Thewlis).

With two distinctive achievements of her own behind her, what led Peploe to collaborate with her husband on a Bertolucci-directed movie? "This was a very particular case," she told me recently. "I read the story 10 years ago and completely fell in love with it. I couldn't convince anyone it was a film. But when Bernardo was looking for something to do for television, I suggested this. I thought it would be nice for him to make a love story -- in his movies, sex is usually connected with death and despair."

In Lasdun's story, the heroine is a South American in London. When the financial arrangements demanded an Italian location, the filmmakers retained the hero's name, Mr. Kinsky, and his English nationality. But they transformed the woman into an African named Shandurai. This maintained the story's power dynamic and was aesthetically piercing, since the rhythm of the African woman's speech and the style of her movements contrast thrillingly with the sights and sounds inside and out of Kinsky's ornate house. And with the way Bertolucci and Peploe modulated Lasdun's story, knocking a few years off of the hero's age, Shandurai's taste for hard-driving African-flavored pop infiltrates and energizes Kinsky's classical music-making.

The situation is fraught with political and emotional tension. Shandurai assumes that a man living on his own and playing the piano all day must be a wealthy colonialist. And Peploe knew that in the film (as in the story), having Shandurai be his housekeeper would prove a sure-fire source of agitation: "No friend knows as much as a cleaner does, who has actually taken off your linens and washed your bedclothes and observed your most intimate habits. My view is that Kinsky, at the start, has been traumatized by women; he thinks that Shandurai is no threat because she's a lodger. But he's wrong. Even when he declares his love, he doesn't know how overwhelmed he is."

Shandurai angrily rebuffs him, saying that if he wants to do anything for her, he can get her husband out of jail. Astonishingly, Kinsky starts selling off his precious art and artifacts to buy the husband's safety and release. "There's no colonial thing at all of Kinsky trying to help a black woman," says Peploe. "He's doing it for Shandurai. If she speaks to him in a polite, servile way, that's to keep her distance." It's an inspired stroke to make her a medical student. Shandurai comes off as the sort of ultra-capable person who would find an eccentric artist like Kinsky puzzling -- then irritating -- and finally seductive. "And he does something so amazing that all the emotions she has suppressed bubble up. She doesn't even know that she's in love with him; that overtakes her in a drunken state. It might still be too much for her to accept. We leave it up to the audience to write the end."

Talking to Peploe on the phone from her home in Italy, I found myself laughing in appreciation, not at bon mots or jokes, but at her astounding poise while describing a remarkable life. "Besieged" connects directly to Peploe's own experience of being a passionate outsider wherever she's lived -- as do "High Season" and "Rough Magic," which deserve to be rediscovered in the wake of this film's critical success.

Peploe was born in Tanzania, but moved immediately to Kenya, where she spent four and a half years before her family returned to Europe. Swahili was her first language. She explains: "My parents were in Greece when World War II broke out. They were really an odd couple of aesthetes, devoted to beautiful landscapes and reading. When war came, they couldn't get back to England; the British government sent them to Cyprus, then to Palestine and then to East Africa, where my father had a British civil service job, and I was born."

There was nothing Hemingway-esque about Peploe's time on what was then called the Dark Continent: "My parents weren't at all sporty. My mother was a painter. She came from a bohemian family -- they were artistic and they had some money. Her mother was a painter, too, and her grandfather was a sculptor. My father was Scottish, had no money, but was the son of a famous painter in Scotland, Sam Peploe [known as S.J. Peploe]. He was part of a group called the Colorists, who were almost the equivalent of French impressionists, except Scottish.

"My parents weren't as happy as I was in Africa. We lived in the middle of a game reserve lent to my father by a strange character, who was a French hunter and biologist. My mother missed the Mediterranean light, which she liked for painting, and they both missed the European culture. But it was bliss for a child. I had no toys, but I don't think I missed any toys -- I had millipedes to play ball with. I have great early memories of early childhood. Afterward, I had this longing for Africa, mal d'Afrique -- the disease of people who feel as if Africa were paradise lost." Even her departure from Africa was a grand adventure: "We went on a boat from Lake Victoria to Alexandria. It was a paddle-steamer on the Nile, and it took a month."

Peploe's mother was half-American, half-German; her grandparents (and her great-grandparents) were expatriates. "They all lived in Florence; they had this big house my great-grandfather had bought, where my mother and grandmother were born. And we still have it." So after the war, she went from Swahili to Italian. The family stayed in Florence for a year and a half, she says; "Then my father began to work for a private gallery in London. I grew up in England, but Italy became the second country in my life. I used to go there every summer and I loved it. But I also loved London, a cosmopolitan city with so many different kinds of lives being led in it. Being there is a kind of drug that I need -- Bernardo and I still go back and forth."

Next page | Bertolucci and Peploe's "Rough Magic"