Nine 1/2 Weeks (1986)

Adrian Lyne's 9½ Weeks arrives from 1986 with a reputation larger than its American grosses and a cult following built in Paris, São Paulo, and the better class of video rental shop. Kim Basinger plays an art gallery employee who falls into an affair with Mickey Rourke's Wall Street broker, and the film tracks the arrangement through expensive watches, blindfolds, a riding crop, and a great deal of rain. The studio trimmed three minutes for American audiences to make the heroine seem more consenting. The trim did not help. The film remains a monochromatic mood piece about two people negotiating a power exchange in expensive rooms.

Judged against the current cultural ledger, the film is a blank. The cast is uniformly white and nobody remarks on it. A cross-dressing episode exists to service the plot, and a mistaken-identity mugging follows without commentary on the subject. The central dynamic, a woman surrendering her autonomy to a dominant man, sits at a distance from any feminist reading, and the film does not appear troubled by the distance. Rourke's broker has money, and the money is a tool of control, not an occasion for a critique of finance. Race, climate, body image, and neurological difference never enter the frame. The film is too busy with the watch and the blindfold.

The picture also refuses to lecture. It has no thesis to deliver and no audience to improve. Its visual grammar is smoke, grey sets, and natural light, and its idea of a sermon is a spanking delivered through a locked door. For a certain kind of viewer this will read as honesty. For the classification project it reads as a clean slate, an artifact from before the audit began. We record the absence and move on to the next title.