The Nines Reviews

The creator comes to life again?

"Although it might look like that, I do not think that this movie is made up of three more or less successful episodes. If the second part seems to be central - being about a TV serie writer on the verge of schizofrenia imagining film-making about his TV series production - that character is most probably like the others just “one” created character!The movie is essentially metaphysical or, more simply, a film about the internal anxiety of creation. To be considered such, it must generate quasi perfect products, "nines", much more coherent and rounded than the products of The Creator Himself (men being just "sevens"). But for such an act of creation one pays sooner or later a high price, to the point that it becomes difficult to distinguish reality and the creator from the product of creation itself: The two become so blurred that the creator cuts the intimate link with the characters and creation is simply stopped.“He won’t come back” says the child-actress or actress-child at the end of the movie. But who is not coming back? The father-character, Gabriel, the actor who impersonates him or, more cogently, all the characters, any character, that the creator, invisible but everpresent, creates? No character will come back because the creator himself faded away: he couldn’t stand anymore the burden of creation and the anxiety that goes with it.Through the different characters of the movie John August leads us through the dramatic meanders of creation. and it is not only the drama of the creator behind the movie, but the drama of ALL those creators who may feel overwhelmed by the very product of their own creation.However, beyond the apparent annihilation of the creative power, doesn't the creator come back to tell us a story? To tell us the story of his dispair and of his emerging schizophrenia? He does, and in doing that. HE COMES TO LIFE AGAIN!THE NINES offers brain matter to anyone who ever thought he could be an artist!"