The Ninth Gate

Dean Corso (Johnny Depp), a rare book specialist, is hired by demonologist Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to authenticate his copy of "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of the Shadows", a book which reputedly reveals a means of entry to the Underworld. Corso intends to compare the two existing copies with Balkan's volume, whose previous owner, Andrew Telfer, committed suicide. Corso discovers that Telfer's widow, Liana (Lena Olin), is determined to recover the book. His apartment is ransacked, and a colleague temporarily looking after the book is murdered.

The Ninth Gate lovingly pays tribute to some of the grand traditions employed by Hitchcock, as well as those utilised by the Hammer Studios during the late 50's/early 60's. "I love the clichés," Polanski has said. "Practically every film I make starts with one. I just try to update them, give them an acceptable shape." The way Polanski "updates" clichés - typically by tearing them out of their expected context and turning them against the audience - implicitly asks us to confront the ways in which we use the institutions of popular genres to express and disguise the structures of power underlying social interaction.

Unlike classic paradigms of the genre such as Dracula and Frankenstein, which usually take place in remote locales, Polanski's versions are typically set in contemporary urban environments. In contrast to the spare and bizarre locations of his early Modernist films, these settings include a wealth of plausible social and physical detail that encourages us to see the protagonists' problems within a believable context. Paradoxically, this increased emphasis on a realistic environment allows Polanski to explore individual psychology more intensely and completely than he could in the abstracted settings of the modernist films. In focusing in his horror films on a single, fully developed individual within a recognisable setting, Polanski invokes many of the expectations of filmic realism. Simultaneously, however, the horror genre also poses an implicit challenge to realism, for it places the realist vision of plausible social interaction against a more primitive worldview that interprets the universe in terms of magic and supernatural forces.

As the narrative of The Ninth Gate progresses Corso travels to Spain and learns from the antiquarians the Ceniza brothers that some of the book's nine engravings are signed "LCF", perhaps meaning "Lucifer". Comparing the book with a copy owned by Victor Fargas, Corso notes a number of variations in the engravings. Fargas is murdered and the engravings are removed from his copy. Rescued from attack by a mysterious girl (Emmanuelle Seigner), Corso inspects the third surviving edition, held by Baroness Kessler in Paris. He notices discrepancies before the Baroness, too, is killed. Corso realises that the secret of "The Nine Gates" is to be found in a combination of all three copies.

In the unending search for the devil undertaken by many of the characters in the film, The Ninth Gate revives the notion of the seductiveness of evil. In Polanski and screen- writer John Brownjohn's narrative (which is based on Arturo Perez-Reverte's novel "El Club Dumas"), the lure of recondite knowledge, and the glamour of the beauty, wealth, power, and riches promised by congress with the devil are seemingly irresistible. The vehicle through which we witness the transformative charms of these seductions is Dean Corso. At the start of the film Corso is acting entirely mercenary, serving his own self-interests. This never ostensibly changes, although the objects of Corso's desires do. What begins as Boris Balkan's search for the authentic "Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows" and access to Satan's realm becomes Corso's own, after he unravels the text's many mysteries and witnesses the lengths to which it drives people to possess it.

If such dark impulses come to motivate Corso's growing "faith" in Satanic prophecies, they also may motivate the viewer's desire to reach a similar point of view within the recreant world of the film. While Perez-Reverte's story ultimately takes the existence of the devil and God seriously, Polanski relentlessly satirises it throughout the film by equating good with evil. Technically Polanski calls all belief into question by continually playing tricks with the film's illusion of reality. Because the artificial style in which the story is presented identifies it as fiction, its status as a creation of the human imagination can become its subject.

"I can only look at religion with a certain dose of irony, because I'm not a religious person." (Roman Polanski)

In the narrative's final sequences Liana Telfer obtains Balkan's version of the Nine Gates. Corso follows Liana to a mansion where she is to officiate at a Satanist ceremony. Balkan violently intervenes, strangles Liana, seizes the engravings and the book and prepares to enter Satan's domain. However the invocation proves faulty and he perishes in a welter of flames. Urged on by the girl, Corso receives the final authentic engraving from the Cenizas and advances through the ninth portal in a blaze of light.

In the horror films, Polanski exploits surrealistic techniques to express his protagonists' conflicts subjectively, encouraging us to see the world in their "distorted" and fantastic vision. Though we may perceive the threatening quality of this world as the product of paranoia, it is nonetheless one we come to share intimately. Many shots show the protagonists in profile at the side of the frame, watching the action along with the spectators.

The Ninth Gate uses Emmanuelle Seigner as an unfathomable distraction, an undeclared agent for some malevolent conspiracy. Polanski sardonically substantiates this with close-ups of her peculiar eyes and startling glimpses of the woman in flight, but then seems to qualify this as giving her the vulnerability to bleed and an interest in reading How to Make Friends and Influence People.

"Why is she [the girl] leaping? Is she really, or is he [Corso] imagining it? It allows me to tell the story in the first person, it's a subjective type of movie, so that you identify more with the central character…You have to put yourself in his skin, observe more or less from his point of view." (Roman Polanski)

Polanski remains a supreme cinematic technician. The Ninth Gate continues a theme of dispossession; the story always appears in transit. A scene typically occurs in the back of a car, in a hotel foyer, or on the threshold of someone else's territory. He adroitly employs corridors, doorways and sprawling apartments, his cast advancing to the camera across the gulf from distant entry points, and in this sense the massive doors featured on every engraving in The Ninth Gate would seem to offer a special fascination. Polanski's visual flair elevates The Ninth Gate's gothic-noir atmosphere to the level of delirium. Filmed in warm, antiquated tones, the look of the film literally captures the dusty, archaic mood that a long-lost tome "written" by Satan would evoke.

Polanski's traumatic wartime experiences naturally had a profound effect on his life and his work, instilling in him an affinity for outsiders as his protagonists. Polanski's characters are society's lost souls, disengaged and cynical, sometimes powerless and inches away from despair, craving to make something of themselves and willing to try any idea to reach that end, no matter how stupid or murderous. The stylisation he got from Beckett and Hitchcock, the morbid fascination with tortuous moral dilemmas, from a Jewish background/upbringing. The rough sexual encounters seem to be the product of his own idiosyncratic ideas. Polanski's interest in tainted and ill-starred characters isn't sheer perversity. As bleak and depressing as his fictional world can be at times, Polanski portrays his protagonists with great humanity, complexity and artistic integrity. Praetorian outsiders, psychopaths and sociopath though they may be, Polanski's characters are individual human beings compassionately rendered.

The central character in Polanski's horror films is consistently obsessed with fantasies of "plots", and Polanski's cinematography encourages similar fears in the spectator. The mise-en-scene often seems to be harbouring hidden points of view, and yet frequently this is revealed as a subjective expression of the protagonist's disturbed perception. The ambiguous nature of the film's mise-en-scene surfaces dramatically at the moments when Polanski achieves the effect of deep space by means of extremely wide fish-eye lenses. Realistic depiction then gives way to a distorted vision that imposes menacingly on the spectator by reflecting the paranoid projections of disturbed sensibilities. Though The Ninth Gate's screenplay stays close to Perez-Reverte's original story, the film maximises the ambiguity between paranoid projection and real events that the novel repeatedly strives to resolve.

The implications of Polanski's self-conscious view of fantasy are most fully expressed in the way he depicts Corso. At the start of the quest Corso, a mercenary and unscrupulous rare book dealer (in the opening scenes, we first see him swindling a - presumed - Alzheimer victim's family out of a priceless edition of Cervantes' "Don Quixote"), embodies the values of a cool rationalist perspective. Needing to assert his own sense of power and control over a threatening world, Corso repeatedly constructs theories from inadequate or ill-interpreted information; and these theories are invariably at odds with the actual situation, making him ultimately responsible for the "disasters" that concludes the action. By self-consciously playing against the horror-film formula pretensions, however, Polanski, at a deeper level, calls these codes into question. The Ninth Gate, in contrast to traditional versions of the formula, in which the narrative is constructed to validate the protagonist's values, Polanski concludes by revealing them as paranoid projections cloaking the protagonist's sense of impotence in the face of the Byzantine complexity and evil of contemporary life.

The Ninth Gate tries to effect a radical shift in its narrative modes. Beginning with a realistic presumption about the effects of paranoid projections on the individual's perceptions, it moves into bizarre and fragmented sequences reflecting upon the ambiguous nature of the horror film form. To some extent, all of his horror films face similar problems in relation to their endings. For how is it possible to resolve a story that gradually creates greater and greater ambiguities about the nature of reality?

In The Ninth Gate, Polanski indicates a shift in the logic of contemporary horror films - here, supreme evil is something that must be sought out, or sought after, and it is an isolating/individual quest. The devil doesn't come to us, we must go to him; after all, The Ninth Gate isn't itself a portal for evil to enter our world, but a passageway through which we reach hell.

Polanski never allows us to forget that we are watching a film. He characteristically makes us question the motives that underlie our interest in the false self of the filmic body he has created. The conclusion calls into question the viewer's motives for participating in the fantasies - and especially this particular horror variation. The film places us in such a relation to the psychological disposition of Corso as to open up for us perspectives on the everyday as a scene of eerie acuity and the bizarre. As a result, we feel intimately involved in the fate of his character. In the film, Polanski pushes an attack on audience sensibilities to an extreme where it becomes forced to an excessive level, for we have come to feel more for Corso than simple curiosity or voyeuristic sadism. We have felt a certain degree of empathy - because this is what the film's realist conventions initially ask of us. And we may feel betrayed by Polanski's shifts of mode, a shift that attempts to deny the meaningful status of our original relationship to the narrative. The dilemma however resides not only with Polanski's film but also with the horror genre itself. Polanski, with his usual contrariety, has forced the audience to confront the compromised nature of the pleasure in the genre even as he has satisfied it. The film's audience is increasingly encouraged to react to the protagonists as alien and objectified "others", projections of forbidden impulses within us. Polanski's vision is thus deepened by his confrontation with the traditional horror formula. His horror films do not simply illustrate cultural processes that victimise and torment the powerless; they ask us to question our own participation in such processes, and therefore expose the structures of domination that popular conventions naturalise. Ultimately the subject of Polanski's horror films is not ostensibly others, but otherness itself. This, apparently, is the kind of thing the director has in mind when he speaks of "updating" the clichés.

Reviewed by Adrian Gargett