Nine And A Half Weeks: Original Uncut Version - Blu-ray (MGM, 1986) Warner Home Video

Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger illustrate the virtues and vices of indulging their kink in director, Adrian Lyne’s Nine and a Half Weeks (1986, and forever thereafter billed in poster art as 9 ½ Weeks). In retrospect, the picture is foreplay for Lyne’s ultimate trek into erotica gone bad, the illicit and sex-laden thriller, Fatal Attraction, made and released one year later. Alas, what passed for semi-explicit S&M in the naïve 1980’s, now plays as a dry run for E.L. James’ penultimate wet dream/male fantasy, Fifty Shades of Grey and the abysmal 2015 movie from it. But today, Nine and a Half Weeks takes on the tinny pall of being just another crotch-grabbing excuse to create a lot of blushing nonsense, pushing the permissible boundaries of a basically plotless and meandering melodrama into R-rated and sex-crazed ‘much ado about nothing’. The whole story can be summed up in a sentence: Basinger’s otherwise put-together, but divorced SoHo art dealer, Elizabeth McGraw gets dominated by slick Wall Street arbitrageur, John Gray. The screenplay by Sarah Kernochan, Zalman King and Patricia Louisianna Knop departs from Austrian-American author, Ingeborg Day’s 1978 novel, 9 ½ Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair, eschewing virtually any and all references to John’s criminal sidelines, and, his coercion of Liz to commit a violent mugging in an elevator. So, darling John is a pervert, not a criminal, and a bit of a sadist besides. Just the sort you take home to mother – especially if she shares in his proclivity to be tied up! The book also concludes with John’s quasi-rape of his paramour to shatter her psyche and send her packing to an asylum from which she will likely never return. This was not to Lyne’s liking, and definitely contrary to his ambitions to will something of a ‘love story’ from nearly a 2-hours tease, leading to the inevitable split.  Apparently, even Elizabeth has standards – as weak-kneed, inane and co-dependent as they are.

Nevertheless, Lyne’s movie retains the novel’s rather somber tone, occasionally interpolated with brief respites of levity supplied by Liz’s gallery cohorts. These include best-gal, Molly (Margaret Whitton), owner, Harvey (David Margulies), opinionated fair-weather, Thea (Christine Baranski), Sue (Karen Young), Ted (William De Acutis) and stuffy art critic, Sinclair (Roderick Cook). Virtually all of these characters are wasted as Lyne’s direction increasingly devolves into a series of courser vignettes to allow Elizabeth’s better judgement to be eroded by John’s niggling and depraved desire to break her inhibitions down to the bedrock and beyond respectable arousal. Liz turns from yearning and eager lover to craven and cowering sex toy, repeatedly shamed as John plies his wicked charm to see how far she will go to please him. Apparently, too far for Liz and not far enough to completely satisfy John. In the end, neither gets what they are after, leaving Liz, whose self-respect has been irreprehensible distorted, to pack her bags and walk out on her warped lover for good. For all intent and purposes, Elizabeth would have done better to get off the Ferris Wheel at the start of their flagrante delicto and deliver a swift kick to Johnny’s jewels after he paid the operator to strand her at its apex, thus to tempt her natural fear of heights.

At the time of its release, Nine and a Half Weeks was viewed as sensual, with the now barely recognizable Mickey Rourke billed as the new Hollywood heartthrob. To be certain, Rourke possesses a peculiar bent and ‘quality’, capable of eliciting a modicum of empathy for this otherwise irredeemable bondage-loving freak. Lyne affords John a singular moment of truth in the penultimate scene where Rourke genuinely emotes regret for having pushed his latest tryst too far. Even in this day of National Enquirer-esque ‘full disclosure’, Rourke’s own past – what came before Hollywood – has remained clouded in a thick haze of mystery. While he has never publicly spoken about his upbringing beyond a thumbnail sketch, though much later to infer it was about as nightmarish and ugly as childhood can get – without disclosing details - even as the baton of responsibility entrusted to those, decidedly, did not have his young man’s best interests at heart, Rourke, despite these misgivings and run-ins with the law, has remained one of the most genuine and frank ‘old souls’, his physical appearance since to have caught up to where this mindset was all along. Whatever the circumstances of his youth, they certainly provided Rourke with an arsenal of emotional baggage played out in the tabloids, but otherwise to give him the chutzpah and clarity to create such a pseudo-romantic entity, with an impish ‘little boy’ quality to offset the otherwise morally bankrupt cruelty John inflicts on Elizabeth, systemically transforming his hot date into a cheap trick with a wave of his sadomasochistic hand. John Gray is a character who could have so easily emerged from Lyne’s gumbo as just another cardboard cutout of the warped and sexually frustrated goon caste. Instead, Rourke lends him a weirdly lacerated spirit and perhaps even a guarded heart. Liz is just the latest in a long line of potential mates John has seduced with his temptingly sly flashes of playful innocence, to mask killer instincts that, in one or two scenes, turn so easily from dehumanizing erogenous appetite into a murderous rage of never-to-be exorcised venom against all women to whom he is sexually attracted.

Nine and a Half Weeks was actually completed in 1984, but held back, then heavily censored by its distributors – cash-strapped and dying MGM/UA. Execs attempted to dilute the picture’s potency while retaining its spark of sensuality. Bad investment. Graver executive decision. Nine and a Half Weeks tanked at the box office, barely earning back $6.7 million on its $17 million outlay. Curiously, it quickly developed a cult following, fermented on home video as word of mouth spread from those who had seen it. Indeed, something quite naughty was in the wind. Particularly in the eighties, movies like Nine and a Half Weeks acquired their gusto mostly from the sexually gun-shy, though curious, still unable to cross that threshold into watching full-on pornography. A major Hollywood release, sanctified with sex. That’s okay. And, to be sure, despite its premise, Nine and a Half Weeks has very little gratuitous nudity. One thing about Adrian Lyne. He distinctly knows where to apply both pressure and the brakes to tease and titillate – working the lather into a rapturous froth, then pulling back just before all its orgasmic activity gets too pitched and messy for the Kleenex.  Yet, Nine and a Half Weeks is not altogether satisfying, even as an erotic drama – decidedly skewed to appeal to the male animal instinct, or perhaps, as an abject lesson in how not to treat your playmate of the evening.

Liz’s first encounter with John seems innocuous, his brief flirtations inside a dimly lit Chinese grocery store, leading to another ‘chance’ encounter at a street vendor’s marketplace where she spies, but decides against buying, an expensive scarf. As a lure, John acquires the scarf, but keeps it from Liz until he has her otherwise hooked, tempting with only a thumbnail sketch of his profession and modus operandi, quickly to escalate from scintillating sexual semantics into ever-increasingly cruel and unusual acts of humiliation, like soiling the newly showered Liz, wearing only a bath robe, with all manner of slippery food stuffs, some force-fed to the point of regurgitation. In another vignette, John purchases a riding crop, later, to use it threateningly to force Liz to crawl towards him, picking up crumbled bills he has scattered across the floor of his apartment. Between these bookends of human degradation, John pursues Liz, buying her a gold watch he suggests can hypnotize her into doing his every bidding. Indeed, not long after acquiring the time piece, Liz follows through on John’s promise to think about him every day by vigorously masturbating at the gallery. She also dresses like a man, complete with pasted on moustache, to get into John’s club, wearing the disguise to a fashionable restaurant where they make out in public. Mistaking her for a man, a trio of gay-bashers threaten the couple on their walk home, leading to a scene in a rain-soaked and dark alley. There, John corners his attackers, beating them senseless before Liz, having acquired a straight razor from one of the men, proceeds to inflict pain, causing them to flee. The moment ends with John taking out the remainder of his vigorous energies on Liz, whom he strips and savages as water gushes down a drain spout. Dear Mr. Lyne. He certainly knows his Freud.  At work, Molly, sensing her best friend has entered into a darkly purposed relationship, tries at first to get Elizabeth to take a phone call from her divorced hubby, Bruce (Olek Krupa), then, in an about-face, goes after Bruce for her own instead, eventually sleeping with Liz’s ex, but confessing all to her best friend sometime later. Eventually, Elizabeth realizes John’s desire will never actually blossom into the kind of love either can cling to for life. Tearfully, she packs her bags and departs his apartment. The movie ends with John declaring “I love you” to an empty room, still unknowing of the true meaning in those words, with a cutaway to an increasingly tearful Liz, navigating the foot traffic near Time Square.

Viewed today, Nine and a Half Weeks is not quite as disturbing as it must have seemed in 1986, a decade rocked in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic, causing many to question just how far human badinage could go and still be considered ‘safe sex’. Interestingly, there is not a whole lot of actual sex depicted in the picture…or rather, much of what is here gets distilled into a few brief flashes of Johnny’s hands all over Liz’s breasts, and some sweaty close-ups of the actors’ faces pitching and panting in tandem. The scene that eventually comes to define the trajectory of Liz and John’s ‘relationship’ – where he questions her as to whether or not she has gone through his apartment in search of his past, to which she reluctantly confesses, leading to his pseudo-rape as a punishment for her curiosity (you know what they say about it killing the pussy…or rather, the cat), is a bit too ‘on the nose’ – coming too late to be a real/reel shocker. Given John’s proclivity for enjoying Liz’s bizarre humiliation, including a scene where he encourages her to steal an expensive necklace from the jewelry counter, and then orders her to lay on fresh linens in a department store’s bedding display, to be fondled by him in full view of the questioning, middle-aged sales clerk (Justine Johnston), we know exactly where all this brutal manipulation is headed, even if Liz is too dull or intoxicated on her own orgasmic vapors to figure things out for herself, or too willing and easily excitable not to recognize she is wrecking her own happiness for the immediate physical gratification, only to deepen an obsession shared by two, from whence her gentle heart will never heal. To suggest Nine and a Half Weeks is the ultimate male fantasy is obscene, and, a fairly sad indictment on the masculine drive and behavior as Lyne’s lame offering is far nastier than naughty. There is a fine line of distinction between erotica and smut. Nine and a Half Weeks frequently crosses it, the kink becoming increasingly corrosive and frequently corny rather than juicy and invigorating.  Is it any wonder the picture tanked at the box office in 1986? Or is it an even bigger one, its reputation as a transgressive art house fav has matured ever since?

Nine and a Half Weeks has been available on Blu-ray for some time and in lieu of my more recent screening of Color of Night (1994) it seemed apropos to revisit the kick-starter for this crotch-hungry subgenre. The results do not hold up. Warner’s hi-def incarnation sports some fairly subdued colors to the point where certain scenes appear almost monochromatic. Given - Peter Biziou’s gritty cinematography was never meant to evoke a high key-lit masterpiece of the painterly Hollywood ilk. But something about this 1080p transfer just seems off, starting with the flesh tones. These are mostly ruddy brown-beige. The deliberately blown-out contrast creates a blanched urban landscape with amplified grain. But the grain looks clumpy rather than indigenous to its source – too thick and digitally harsh to actually obscure fine details in long shots. Lyne’s movies are not about creating a visually arresting image, but rather taking the ugliness of reality to the nth degree of hyper-realism.  But again, Nine and a Half Weeks’ visual presentation here is problematically resolved. Audio is another issue. While the pop-tune infused score explodes at decibels that will shatter the eardrum, dialogue scenes are presented at such a low frequency, necessitating the chronic toggling up and down on one’s remote, raising and lowering the volume to egregious levels, just to squeeze out some strained audibility. The MGM trademark that opens the picture suffers from an ambient funnel-like echo.  Odd. We get only a theatrical trailer to augment the viewing experience. Bottom line: Nine and a Half Weeks wasn’t a great film in 1984 when it was made or improved upon for its 1986 theatrical debut. It also has not improved with age. Some movies spurned at the outset of their arrival into our collective memories continue to ripen with age into vintage champagne. Regrettably, Nine and a Half Weeks illustrates the flipside: begun as vinegar, turning even more rancid and off-putting with each passing year. For a picture with the lowest of aspirations to outdo softcore, Nine and a Half Weeks cannot even hold its half-blown artistic wad long enough to get us completely interested in its pair of stick figures with no soul. Its presentation on Blu-ray is pretty limp too. Pass, and be glad that you did.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

1

VIDEO/AUDIO

2.5

EXTRAS

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