9 1/2 Weeks movie review & film summary (1986)

In the film, they play strangers who meet one day in a Chinese grocery store in Manhattan - Elizabeth, the smart, pretty assistant in a Soho art gallery, and John, the smiling, enigmatic commodities broker. Their first meeting is crucial to the entire film, and it is a quiet masterpiece of implication. She waits by a counter. Senses someone is standing behind her. Turns, and meets his eyes. He smiles.

She turns away. Is obviously surprised by how much power was in their exchange of glances. She hesitates, turns back, meets his eyes again, almost boldly, and then turns away again. And a few minutes later looks at him very curiously as he walks away along the street.

They meet again, of course, and that is the beginning of their relationship, as chronicled first in a best-selling novel by Elizabeth McNeill and now in this movie by Adrian Lyne, the director of "Flashdance." It is clear from the start that they aren't going to follow an orthodox pattern of courtship and romance.

He offers her, quite boldly, an experimental erotic relationship.

The first time he touches her seriously is to tie a blindfold around her eyes. They advance into arenas of lovemaking often described in the letters column in Penthouse, and Elizabeth, for the most part, is prepared to let John call all the shots. He wants to be in control, and as she surrenders to him, she abandons herself to dreamy, erotic absentmindedness.

John is nothing if not inventive. In the scene that is likely to be the most talked-about in this movie, he blindfolds her and feeds her all kinds of strange foods - sweet and sour, different textures, each one a surprise to her. It's astonishing the way the movie makes this visual scene so tactile. John calls her at unexpected times, orders her to unorthodox rendezvous, and as she follows his instructions, they both seem to retreat more deeply into their obsession.

The movie contrasts their private life with the everyday world of her work: with the small talk and gossip of the art gallery, with a visit she pays to an old artist who lives like a hermit in the woods, with the intrigue as her ex-husband dates another woman in the gallery.

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