Johnny Depp stars as Dean Corso, a goateed, unethical book dealer who specializes in finding rare books for wealthy collectors (the kind of books not available online at Amazon.com). One particular collector, Boris Balkan (Frank Langella), requests Dean's help in locating two existing copies of "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows," a guide on how to conjure the spirit of Satan, reportedly written by Satan himself. But Satan could not have written three different copies of the same book, now could he? Dean's job is to authenticate the other existing copies, and to determine if Balkan's is the real deal. At first hesitant, Dean decides to travel to New York, Paris and Portugal on his search. He encounters twin booksellers, a feisty widow (Lena Olin), a stringent baroness in a wheelchair (Barbara Jefford), and an aristocrat who plays the violin (Jack Taylor) and lays out all his precious books on the floor of his living room. Naturally there are mysterious deaths along the way, and there is a mysterious woman, identified in the credits as the Girl, with piercing green eyes (Emanuelle Seigner, Polanski's wife) who happens to appear wherever Dean goes.
"The Ninth Gate" has a smoothly refined, exquisitely moody feel to it, thanks to the amber, murky tones in the cinematography. Every scene in the film feels as if there are mysterious forces within waiting to be uncovered, and the pages of the books evoke an elusiveness in Dean's close introspection of every single detail - you just sense he will find something which may lead nowhere. That is Polanski's gift as a storyteller, letting minute details flourish in our mind but we must be quick to catch them. I like the way he makes us focus on the Girl when she first appears at Balkan's lecture, he tilts the camera down to show that her legs barely touch the floor where she sits. The other neat touch, though incidental in theory, is when Balkan shows Dean his collection of books guarded by glass doors where the password to open them is 666. I also found it interesting that Dean never sees the Girl floating in the air whenever chaos ensues.
In the past, Polanski's atmosphere, mood and implicit horror always lead to a dramatic, shocking finale, as in "Repulsion" or "Rosemary's Baby." This time, the film sort of ends but in such an abrupt, wanting fashion that we wonder why he went through the whole expense of involving us in the first place. To add insult to injury, the film's final half-hour is submerged in absolute ridicule, including a laughable Satanic ceremony, Langella yelling and screaming while chanting to Satan, and a gratuitous sex scene that would make Hugh Hefner chuckle with derisive laughter.
I still enjoyed "Ninth Gate" overall but it is more of an exercise in style than substance, and Polanski does not take the film as seriously as he should have. It is as if he wanted to revisit the themes of "Rosemary's Baby" and decided to end it all in a "Fearless Vampire Killers" mode. A guilty pleasure for us, and probably for Roman as well.
For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at http://buffs.moviething.com/buffs/faust/
E-mail me with any questions, concerns or comments at faustus_08520@yahoo.com or at Faust667@aol.com
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