‘Your films are so stylish’, fawns Kate Hudson at one point during Nine, trying to get its hero, director Guido Contini, into bed. ‘You care as much about the suit as you do about the man wearing it’. It’s dangerously easy to apply this quote to the film itself; Chicago director Rob Marshall pays overblown stage-homage to Fellini, with a musical detailing the director and his women, all bewilderingly acted and sung in silly Italian accents. Scenes are lifted and re-enacted; Penelope Cruz sizzles as a new Sandra Milo, wild-eyed diva Fergie shines, paying strong-lunged tribute to Amarcord, and the perennially miscast Nicole Kidman makes for a paltry Anita Ekberg, flitting in and out of scenes in a bouffant blonde wig. Nine is a film about a film about the making of another film, in which the plot is slowly devouring itself.
We are guided and directed through the meta-cinematic maze, fittingly enough, by Guido, Daniel Day Lewis’ skinny-tied protagonist. The director is a magnetically attractive monster of ego and fecklessness, forever cancelling meetings, fleeing to curl up in the foetal position in the refuge of the dressing-room. The con at the heart of the film is that there is no script; Guido is fashioning a plotline as he goes along, from the wreckage of his personal life. Like its template, 8 1/2, each scene brings a confusion of new and demanding characters, and the appearance of each of the nine actresses merits a show-stopping, visually stunning (though rarely very catchy) song. Nine is incoherent but technically brilliant, luscious, excessive – but prohibited from being a guilty pleasure by its lofty and ‘artistic’ subject. Where Chicago tried a little too hard to win us over to musical theatre, Nine dives straight in and assaults us with spectacle, barely stopping to ground the songs in any logical context. There are simply too many showgirls, too little time, too much money thrown at over-the-top show stoppers themed around Folies Bergéres.. It’s a blatantly indulgent premise, an excuse for half of Hollywood to sing and dance and re-enact characters from cinema history. But then isn’t that what Oscar films are for? Nine is a beautifully executed artistic love-in, an insubstantial but dazzling riot of pasta pastiche and pointless Oscar-angling.
Words: Roisin Kiberd
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_5_lzags3I
