Seen: March 24th, 2007
Format: DVD
Rating: 4
It's pretty rare that I start out by talking about the Executive Producer of a film, but that's what caught my eye when the credits rolled.
This film is written and directed by Rodrigo Garciá, and Executive Produced by Alejandro González Iñárritu. I didn't know anything at all about Garcia, but this had the distinct feel of an Iñárritu film. It was composed of many stories, all of a similar basic theme, most linked together by the coincidence of sharing some characters. Sounds a bit like Babel to me. I thought perhaps that Garciá was a protege.
After a small bit of research, it turns out that Garciá is an accomplished writer and director in his own right, and older as well. In fact, I believe that Nine Live is an extension of Garciá's earlier projects, Ten Tiny Love Stories and Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her. He seems to have some unfinished business here.
So What? So basically the same problems I had with Babel exist here, but are magnified.
The theme again is women and their issues. I'm a guy, so I won't even contemplate speaking for women, but I wonder whether another guy is the right person to write a series of nine short dramatic pieces about women's issues. Especially since this is his third go-round. I'm not saying he got it wrong. How could I possibly know if he got it right?
Again there is a problem with relevant connectivity. The individual stories share a few characters, but this is far too little to tie them together as a cohesive whole. Each of the stories has a hanging ending. The transitions are stark and sudden, effectively separating them instead of uniting them.
This is, in my opinion, not a film at all, but a collection of one scene plays, shot on film and cobbled together. As I watched Nine Lives, I actually imagined it staged as small plays, and I think that amazing things could be done with it in that medium. Garciá films each section as a single take, furthering this play-like atmosphere by subjecting his actors to the sustained performances more common to plays than film.
The talent here is top-notch. Almost every time a new character appeared, it was portrayed by someone I recognized and respected. I'm quite certain that each actor prepared diligently for their parts. I'm sure they knew the character inside and out, perhaps even inventing backstories. Unfortunately this is lost to us, the audience.
The pieces are so short that no character development occurs. We must react to each character in a single, constrained context, or perhaps two, it they span stories and have a significant part in each. The characters have no time to grow and breathe, no time to unfold. We're presented with them in full maturity.
We spent most of our time cataloging reactions and trying to piece the story together from the limited information we're given. We don't know who is good, who is bad, or really who did what to whom to produce the reactions we see. We spend so much of our limited time trying to decipher the action that we have no time left to understand or empathize with any of the characters. We're left feeling out of the loop, left on the outside looking in, which again this reinforces the play-like aspect of the piece.
While I feel that there's excellent material here, I feel that Nine Lives doesn't deliver as a film. The ideas and characters could be compelling if we only had the chance to get to know them. For now, they're only strangers on the other side of the window.
The Good: Excellent performances by veterans
The Bad: The illusion of relevant connection
The Ugly: Secrets revealed in social situations
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