Genre: Thriller/Occult| Year: 1999 | Duration: 133 mins | Director: Roman Polanski| Medium: VCD (Eagle Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | My rating:4*/5*
Fav Dialogue: “Liana : Don’t fuck with me!
Corso: I thought I already did.”
Perennial provocateur Roman Polanski directed this occult movie based on a part of the book El Club Dumas, and in the process made a very clever story. I loved the part of all the books and book fanatics in this film. The film is about this demonical book, The Nine Gates to the Kingdom of Shadows, chased by Dean Corso(Johnny Depp), an unscruplous & infamous dealer of rare books, to find the authenticity of the book owned by his client Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) and compare it with two other copies that exists with two other book fanatcis & collectors. The book seems to have been written in collaboration of the Devil himself with instructions on how to invoke satan and enter his realm.
Most of the characters in the film seems to be seduced by the evil, are on an unending search for the devil (which never appears throughout the movie, which is good direction and story telling). Balkan’s quest ended in death for him and Corso crossing the ninth gate, having witnessed the entire process during his detective work for the book, and helped by the succubus girl (Emmanuel Seigner) against all perils (and remains a mystery till the end in the movie). The movie is full of riddles being unfolded, and the last riddle is for the viewers to solve concerning the ninth ritual, which was forged in the book. The succubus girl have sex with Corso amidst the backdrop of flames, thus completing the ninth ritual, and corso returning to the castle to cross over.
Being a bibliophile, I truly enjoyed The Ninth Gate as my ‘Movie of the Day’.
“We commonly think of ourselves as little and lost in the infinite stretches of time and space, so that it comes as a shock when the French poet Baudelaire speaks of ‘cradling our infinite on the finite seas’. Really? Is it ourself, our mind or spirit, that is infinity’s proper home? Or might the infinite be neither out there nor in here but only in language, a pretty conceit of poetry?” – Robert Kaplan & Ellen Kaplan, The Art of the Infinite: Our Lost Language of Numbers
