All posts tagged ending

Written by Patrick Cronin.

This film sits difficultly with one in many ways. The acting, as one expects from Day-Lewis, is perfect, as for the others, they too were strong, but did they all need to be there? The camera work: editing and framing, and all the technical aspects of lighting etc, were as solid. The musical scenes too were well put together. All this seems adequate for the film to rollick freely about ones cinematic palette like good wine, only all these aspects but for Day-Lewis’s acting, could have been improved, and not just improved but heightened to supreme levels.

It is the script which let all these good parts go to waste rather than tying together into a whole. I feel the script deserves most the interest of this article as it seems both the most interesting and worst part of the film.

The set-up is simple: Day-Lewis’s character is to direct another film, his past films having made him famous in Italy. Only he is without a script. The sets, actors, costumes etc are all in order ready to film and he’s not a single idea other than it stars his usual heroine (Nicole Kidman) and is titled Italia.

Nine plays as the musical version of Fellini’s 8 ½. This not only enables Nine the room for an Adaptation-like narrative as a musical but also much originality for which it only started to have, but didn’t fulfill.

In ‘An American In Paris’, Gene Kelly’s agony toward the film’s end is depicted through a 20-minute long sequence in which, after losing his lover to another man, he dances to Gershwin through an transformative stage miniature of Paris, with fountains and obviously painted backdrops. The set transforms according to the miniature narrative condensed into this long scene, operating as a Broadway stage. These are no lyric songs, only the ballet of Gershwin. What makes this scene of such interest is not only its obvious conceit, but its working as a kind of dream or psychological scene. A close up of Kelly’s face dissolves into the set, and back again on this face when it is over. The fabric of his feelings and thoughts are actualized on camera. He is alone on the set, all the other dances are figments of his present feelings. The scene of course begins with a torn picture he drew. His own artistry becomes part of and the way into his feelings. This more than anything in the film should have been exploited in Nine.

(You can watch the sequence here, begin at 4:00 minutes in.

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This idea is where Nine takes its musical scenes. They all appear to be occurring within Day-Lewis’s mind as he imagines how his film might be. This seems a more credible way than most other musicals which will always have that between then and great success. Who in the world breaks out into song like that, fully choreographed?

This is not a film we expect the hero to wake up at film’s end to find he dreamt it all. His real experience weaves into and influences what these imagery musical cuts become. The focus of these scenes, however is not so much possible-story plots for his script, but provocative Broadway women dancing to his erotic projections. Nine then has another story, that of love, but not a love triangle, but a love hexagon. As I said, were all these characters necessary? Some, Kate Hudson and Nicole Kidman for example, had fewer than three scenes, and even those who were given more time, Cruz and (wife), their characters were still flat and simple. Sophia Loren, whom I hoped would play a larger part as his mother, seemed to play no role at all other than put her face in front of the camera a few times.

The basis for these musical scenes is quite rich with possibility. They are the opportune scenes to adapt Gene Kelly’s sequence into a film-long surreal and symbolic expedition into the director’s head as he tries to find his script. This would, of course be a surreal musical version in the genre that Adaptation created. And yet it had the potential to bring back the old surreal cinema of Jean Cocteau and other early 20^th century French films; more to do with symbolic and meta-fictional, and clever-practical (rather than CG effects) uses of the camera than the usual cliché surrealism of hallucinations. Observe Polanski’s addition to his Macbeth script which uses exactly this illusionary metaphysical method:

– fast-forward to 3.00 minutes in, particularly after 5.30 minutes – this is the kind of symbolic imagery needed. But the style of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is to be avoided at all costs.

Instead, the basis of the musical scenes is lost when one finds what little narrative is told in these rather long sequences. They are more interested in slapping thighs and breasts that giving these bodies any narrative drive. Any narrative made in these sequences in all in the lyrics. But who is listening to the lyrics when such beautiful alluring bodies are being thrown at you. The problem here is the loss on continuity between image and lyric. On top of this, the surreal technique of symbolism could very much help this. There would then be a point to the sequences. On top of this, when narrative is made, there would be real emotional importance. The importance here seems no more than erotic seduction, and while this is accountable in Day-Lewis’s character, it isn’t enough. There is no variation from one to the next and each has no important place where it is. They could be cut from the reel and re-arranged and little of the dull effect of these scenes would vanish. This shows too obviously the lack of the script.

One may draw the criticism of the fragmented nature of the scenes, though this is again not a bad element, only an under-fulfilled one. This, the invasion of musical cuts into scenes is not irrational fragmentation. They indicate the move between outer world to inner (Day-Lewis’s) world. The sets for these musical cuts resemble, though not as obviously conceited as they could be, Broadway stages. There is opportunity here for a matching up of real world with the cinematic world, the philosophical fruits of which are too tempting not to dream up while you are watching it. The filmic, or rather creative process could have been very deeply explored.

As for the other plot, the romantic one, this too is under-developed. I was hoping, by the film’s end for some sort of tying the knot on an image of the cinematic and erotic. I remembered Jameson’s quote about all film being pornographic in that each film leaves you in an orgasm of emotion. The statement does not work for literature as well, as the emotions are mostly more detached, alienated and cerebral; less immediate. Though there is certainly some literature which leaves you, all through its pages lying back languidly swimming in its words.

I was hoping for some analysis or presentation of the ‘image’ as deeply erotic in its revealing and concealing of truths and lies, its provocative sensuality and beauty. The women of the film too, operating as infinitely deferred objects of desire, always out of reach, but nonetheless taunting in their realism of image might parallel his elusive script. One would then read the gap between dreams and reality as the place of conflict between the director and his lovers. He cannot translate what is in his head for what is in his reality. Isn’t this precisely the mystery, and problem, about expression and art? Communicating and realizing your mental scape to the real-scape? And how should the film end? Acknowledgement that he must step back from reality and stare at it through a lens. The message (keeping away from didactic or preaching narrative) would be that artists (indeed all) can only see the world through a filter of art. The arc of the film, roughly anyway, would run along this direction. And taking it further, perhaps his inner dream-world would end up revealing a deeper and clearer reality than the real one, thus his finding of a script and taking order of his jumbling symbolic dreams, may inverse at the moment of catharsis, rendering his reality full of mad people and surreal elements, while only in his art do things make true sense. A question that remains is how the other characters would register this change in the director. Would it be some disruption of sanity, much like Brazil in which the director lives out his life happily in some illusion? I think that would be too cheap, even philistine. Art is more complex. What kind of message would that make? It is better to lose your mind in art, the true illusion, than confront reality? No. The real message ought to be that one can confront reality and make sense of it only through illusion. Slavoj Zizek inverses such a logic when he claims ‘there is no virtual reality, only reality of the virtual – that something is real only when it is virtual’.

You may object to this heavily philosophical approach, but name me a deeply philosophical musical? Its originality would be exceptional. And then ask yourself why Fellini and Hitchcock are great and Michael Bay, the master of spectacle without a point, is not.

Unfortunately, the moral arc of Nine is a little uncertain. It seems to run along the line of (in)fidelity to his wife, and his mostly comic Zhivago-like going back and forth between lovers, until a climax in which he has lost her, his wife, even though we have no real connection with her, nor why he insists on loving her. After this his emotional trip seems almost complete, though the film continues into its other plot. After losing her he vanishes and doesn’t direct for 2 years. His coming back to the set to film ‘Nine’ is a great ending, though misplaced. The return of all his lovers to the set in the background, as well as himself as a 9 year-old (the year in which his erotic interests were sparked) are by his side. The moral here is, as Dench says, to be the lustful boy he always was, which enabled him his great films in the past. There is something cheap in this ending as it seems to tear up the turf it has just lain down for the past 2 hours, making his character fall once again back into a womanizing promiscuity, only this time he has the direction of a script. Then we must ask what created the conflict of this film in the first place? I saw it, until the end of course, or at least I hoped, his promiscuous attitude, his erotic problems were, in the ways I’ve been describing, part of his inability to write a script. Though the ending claims nothing of the sort. Nothing in him has really changed which enables him to film, except maybe the realization of his boyhood inner-self. But wasn’t this consciousness of this lust for women always there?

A brief part of the film, that could have been more in-depth, was the scene of his childhood of 9 years old. Though this scene is one of the better musical cuts, it potential is not reached. This is perfect space for real psychoanalytical trauma. The memories of his lust-filled childhood could have worked into the emotional pikes of the story, revealed opportunely to further his character. The film, instead did not progress along such dense narrative flow, but was instead more concerned with trying to be soft-pornography with a bit of story in between.

I have not concentrated on the good elements of this film, and there are many, as not a great deal can be said of them, except that they were not harnessed well enough. With a masterly script, which was perhaps half a dozen re-writes away, this film could have been exceptional.

Written by Patrick Cronin.