Screen Machine

Review: Nine

“The world sees Rome the way you invented it,” Sophia Loren tells Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine. This is the power that a director has when he makes intelligent, affecting films. And from the way he is depicted, it seems that director Guido Contini (Day-Lewis) has achieved such splendour. Emphasising the control that films have over their spectators, declaring that they are indeed not modest, director Rob Marshall is more paying respects to Federico Fellini (from whose 8 1/2 the musical is adapted) than he is boasting about his own work. His film is entertaining, but it lacks the wholly enveloping world that is potentially achieved by film directors, and is a missed opportunity. Marshall’s failure seems almost a replica of Guido’s failure to envisage his country in the ambitious epic Italia (arguably, a similar outcome of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia).

The problem with Nine is not that the songs are terrible, as New York Times reviewer A. O. Scott has claimed, even though some of them really are. The problem is that their presence in the film does not contribute to our understanding of the characters. The one exception is Marion Cotillard’s ‘Take It All,’ the only song that does not have a shallow basis, allowing the viewer some emotional insight into her character. The conversation in the film which revolves around the director’s “easy” job of merely saying “yes” or “no” turns out to be sadly ironic; there is little originality in the film, and even cinematographer Dion Beebe’s work, although impressive, does not fully show off the exceptional talent to which we are privy in his other films. The problem with Nine is its emotional emptiness, badly disguised by the spectacle of performance. The most lively and alive part of the film is the credit sequence, where shots of each character are intercut with shots of each actor rehearsing. Here, we see enjoyment.

At its structural core, Nine is an untidy mélange of life and internal monologues in place of plot. The musical asides are so dramatically staged that they remove the viewer from the actual process of the story and the character development. For Marshall, the answer to all problems is song and dance, costumes and glitter – nothing out of the ordinary in the musical cinema business. But the realisation of this glamour does not live up to the achievements of Fellini; Marshall relies on cross-cutting and Video Hits-style editing rather than long shots of pure performance. In Marshall’s Chicago (2002), this style of editing was fitting because of the snappy personalities of the leads and because, really, Chicago was all about sex. But in Nine it does not fit, and the result is confused and unsatisfying. The sexiness just seems a flourish, an addition assumed necessary, but the film should really have been about Guido’s difficulty with relationships. Instead Marshall hints at this emotional boiling pot and, disappointingly, just leaves it to simmer.

Eloise is a graduate of cinema studies from the University of Melbourne. She is interested in world cinema and in Hollywood cinema of the classical period, particularly film noir. Eloise is a member of the Melbourne Cinematheque Committee.

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