Ninth Gate
I think certain big directors
reach a point in their career where they examine a script not for what they can
bring to it, but for how many interesting European locations with luxury hotels
they can stay in while making it. I think it's a sort of semi-retirement for
them to occasionally half-direct movies. Not every director is like Steven
Spielberg, prowling the set in tennis shoes looking for angles, laying down in
the mud to line up a shot just right, making detailed storyboards, and putting
on a wetsuit so they can jump right in to direct the shark victim. Some are
like Rascally Roman Polanski - they ask only that it be shot either close to
home or somewhere they'd like to go on vacation, and that a plum part be set
aside for their exotic European wife.
Ninth Gate is
Polanski's latest vacation film. It takes place in a variety of charming
European* locations, and features an INORDINATE amount of Johnny Depp sitting
in charming cafes having a meal, and smoking, smoking, smoking, ever smoking.
One can imagine Polanski, his exotic wife Emmanuelle Seigner - who after all is
only in a fraction of the film and had a lot of down time to sight-see with
husband Roman - and Depp treating themselves to nice meals with expensive wine
as the technicians set up another of Polanski's simplistic shots for this film.
And perhaps they had time to treat
themselves not only to a meal but a good steam and a stroll along the channel
as the technicians set up the two shots where Seigner was actually on wires for
her "flying" scenes. I can only assume she was flying; the film
offers no clue about this. My bet is, she was meant to be an angel, although
she exhibits some awfully un-angel like behavior in the last part of the movie.
Maybe she was one of the Lucifer's
angels. Or maybe she was from Krypton. The point is, I don’t think even
Polanski knew. I think he wanted to have some extra time after the lunch break
that day to maybe hit a museum, so he gave the technicians something to keep
them busy.
Polanski makes films so rarely
that it seems he would pick projects that he had a great passion for. But I get
the impression that he doesn't care much about this one at all, or at least not
all of it. He seems to have been mildly inspired by some scenes in Eyes Wide
Shut, a mildly interesting novel about the hunt for a satanic tome, and of
course the latest Fodor's travel guide.
That said, though, Ninth Gate was
still, amazingly, a mildly pleasant distraction, and not just because I went to
see it to get away from the Oscars that night. Polanski creates a slow suspense
in the sleuthing portion of the film, helped along of course by a magnetic
Johnny Depp. He creates a series of shots showing a murdered old woman in an
out-of-control electric wheelchair that would have haunted me to adulthood if
I'd seen them as a kid.
And from the handling of the
special visuals in the film, he seems to have a sort of quaint misunderstanding
about computers and digital effects, as if he isn’t quite sure about these
new-fangled computers. He seems to be using high-tech equipment to recreate
some decidedly low-tech effects - like composite images set dead-center of the
frame for simplicity, or a "back projection" effect used while Depp
and Seigner are on a motorcycle - which
is sort of charming in a missing-the-point kind of way. He probably has access
to a computer that could render dinosaurs and devils that would make us scream
out loud in fright, but he still has his wife hold REALLY REALLY STILL while
they digitally change the color of her eyes from green to brown, as if he
imagined that some technician would be painting her irises by hand on each
frame of the film. (That was another effect without purpose or explanation, by
the way.)
There's enough here - and Depp is
interesting enough - that it makes you wish they'd salvaged a solid
through-line from the script. To give you a hint at the deep dissatisfaction
the story leaves you with, Polanski introduces a book supposed to have been
written by Satan himself, supposedly with the power to summon the Dark One, and
yet he never does allow Satan to be summoned. He also mentions a secret Satanic
cult that supposedly engages in dark orgies, and we actually see a meeting of
the cult, but he never really does much with that, either. Please don't tell me
a book can summon Lucifer or even SAY the word "orgy" and then not
show it to me.
And the ending is... inexplicable.
I don't have to have a resolution spelled out to me in detail, but this one
left even me open-jawed. It went beyond enigmatic, into simply INCOMPLETE. It
was as if Polanski simply lost interest in a story he was telling and left the
room. Did Depp raise the devil? If so, why? Why didn’t it work for Frank
Langella? What happened to him? What WAS Seigner's character? Angel? Devil? I
think the answer is clear: Neither. She was the Director's Wife, and this was
his latest vacation movie. I recommend that if you see this film, you choose to
See this
film when it shows on cable.
*Although there in Polanski's case
there is a very good reason that he chooses to shoot his films in European
locations, one which I will not go into here.
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