9½ Weeks

9½ Weeks; erotic drama, USA, 1986; D: Adrian Lyne, S: Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, Margharet Whitton, Christine Baranski

The blond Elizabeth is a young woman working in an art gallery who spends her time with friends and parties. She buys a toy chicken in a market while lawyer John, whom she met in the store, also gives her a scarf she wanted. They start going out together, yet John provokes her: for instance, he leaves her hanging on a ferris wheel. Soon they start a passionate relationship and have intercourse around the house and even in the basement. Elizabeth in the meantime gets the assignment from her boss to visit painter Farnsworth who feels tired. When John makes her crawl and kiss in three with a prostitute, Elizabeth leaves him.

The most famous mainstream erotic film of the 80s, "9 and a Half Weeks" is a synthesis of video spot aesthetics, sharp cinematography and some pseudo melodrama. The movie is indeed week and thin, but maybe one should see it just make up your own mind about it so that it won't be in the 'unknown zone'. The first intercourse starts some 25 minutes into the film - which is also the limit where even the "respectable" viewers can watch it - while the story has a total of 9 erotic sequences, coincidentally overlapping with the title, some of which are directed with fine style, like the almost classic one where Kim Basinger is dancing in tune to the song "You Can Leave Your Hat On" and strips while the shadow of the window blind can be seen, whom she touches with her finger like a piano key. But some are also very dumb, like when her lover feeds her with strawberries, plums, syrup and others. His deranged sense for the erotic becomes deranged after a while, all episodic characters are unimportant and reduced to extras who seem just like a decoration while the film quickly becomes boring due to the poor screenplay, even though it's a very solid film about the dark side of 'exotic' relationships. 

Grade:+