Polanski's back to the devil, thank God

Roman Polanski hasn't had a hit movie since Tess in 1979. <br><br>That will no doubt change today with the supernatural thriller The Ninth Gate , which puts America's favorite persona non grata

Friday, March 10th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

Roman Polanski hasn't had a hit movie since Tess in 1979.

That will no doubt change today with the supernatural thriller The Ninth Gate , which puts America's favorite persona non grata director back on Rosemary's Baby turf.

Though unseen, the devil is a major figure in The Ninth Gate, which is about a book that supposedly can conjure up Satan himself if the nine engravings in its pages are put together in a certain order and their message read aloud. ``Some books are dangerous; not to be opened with impunity,'' warns one character.

Of course, no one pays heed to that warning and several people are eliminated.

A nightmare sensibility haunts this fright-fest from the start when the film's hypnotic opening credits glide across cobblestone streets and through the nine gates of the title. Uh-oh.

Johnny Depp plays a rascally, profit-driven book dealer who doesn't believe in the supernatural, but who's hired by the fabulously wealthy Boris Balkan to track down the only other two existing copies of this mysterious book in order to see which one is genuine. Apparently Boris has been trying to conjure up Satan from his own copy without much success. Because Boris is played by Frank Langella, who once was famous for Dracula, you don't doubt any of this for a second.

Depp's Dean Corso sees only the monetary possibilities, so he goes on a quest that will take him to a dusty Spanish bookstore, a rundown chateau in Portugal, a fashionable Paris salon and to a strange castle deep in the Pyrenees Mountains. Wherever he searches, however, someone winds up murdered by an unseen hand, giving Dean the uneasy sense of leaving a trail of bodies behind him.

Dean himself will be nearly run down by a big black car, make uneasy friends with a mysterious woman who has deep-set wolfen eyes (Emmanuelle Seigner, who is married to Polanski in real life) and will eventually make a startling discovery about the book's engravings and who may have drawn them.

Polanski creates a growing sense of unease throughout The Ninth Gate, sometimes by no more than camera movement. A scene in which the camera slowly moves in from behind Dean, seated at a table and reading from The Nine Gates , is ominous and scary. Even a sequence that's set up for laughs, featuring a pair of old Spanish book sellers, played by the same merry-faced actor as mischievous twins, is oddly chilling, even as we're amused by the sight of the dimple-cheeked old-timers.

The director, a master of fright in such films as Knife in the Water, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown, hasn't lost his touch. Depp's Dean is savvy and streetsmart, but is slowly losing his grip on reality as he becomes wary and confused. Dean is being sucked into a whirlpool from which there seems little chance at escape. Depp makes that sense of growing terror real for us.

Unfortunately, as the film goes on, there are a couple of moments when Polanski seems to be losing his grip, as well. One, set in a huge mansion where the wealthy have come to worship Satan in hooded robes, smacks too much of the sillier moments from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. For anyone who was disappointed with Kubrick's film, this visual reminder will bring The Ninth Gate to a screeching halt. Fortunately, Polanski doesn't dwell on this sequence.

The film's other misstep revolves around the ranting Boris Balkan, who turns up near the end after having been just a disembodied telephone voice for most of the film. Boris's attempts at Satanism seem particularly inane and overwrought, worse considering the deliberate care that Polanski has exhibited in earlier scenes.

It's a good thing, however, that all this sets up a grabber of an ending when the ninth gate becomes an all too literal reality for Dean.