Met in a Dream or Elsewhere: 9 Kisses

Over the holidays, I came across Elaine Constantine's 9 Kisses on the website of The New York Times. It's a series of short films in which pairs of actors create intimate scenes of passion, all of which involve a kiss. When I first saw it, I found it stylish, smart, and instantly memorable, though out of sync with a holiday mood because of the thread of darkness running through it. 9 Kisses resurfaced around Valentine's Day, and, again, as I watched, disturbing ripples underneath the surface of each film seemed to run counter to any manifest notions of romance.

Ms. Constantine's project continues a tradition at the Times of spotlighting each year's great performers, although they usually appear solo and not paired as they are in 9 Kisses. To me it seems that each scene in Constantine's film uses a kiss as a starting point only, a symbol for all manner of passions and exchanges: seduction, bribery, violence, betrayal, and dominance, as well as, more rarely, tenderness (mostly unreciprocated). Of all the genres that seem to fit here, romance is not the one that springs to mind. There's satire, black humor, horror, noir, and maybe even crime-drama but nothing that seems to foretell happy endings for most of the characters.

If movies are the public dreams of our culture, as Jung tells us, there's always latent content to be accounted for. I've studied the films to try and understand why each affected me the way it did, looking at the characters, settings, costumes, props, camera angles, and lighting, noticing what attracted my eye in each case. I looked at neckwear and wristwatches. I paid attention to the music in the background. I watched a film about the making of the project in which the director and actors can be seen working through their ideas, which was fascinating. I believe that you can, as Ms. Constantine says, read the scenes as nothing more than quirky riffs on romance but also that the content is purposely fluid and indeterminate. I'm reminded of Chris Van Allsburg's The Z Was Zapped, an adventurous and provocative ABC book that leaves it up to the reader to interpret the illustrations.

If you're wondering what I mean by latent content, begin with the oddities within each scene that seem to work against the surface story. Two people meet in a fashionable garden for a tryst, which might seem no more than a secret affair except for the odd costuming, the gloved hands on the neck, and the excessively shocked expressions when a light is shone on them. Two middle-aged people on a date seem merely shy until an explosive kiss rips away all veneer of self-control and they become the butt of laughter. Two women celebrating New Year's Eve seem to be lovers except for the way one woman's smiles veer almost imperceptibly from excited to predatory as the other woman sinks slowly out of sight. An intense young woman (and wasn't that actress last seen as a vampire?) closely watches a male singer from the audience before rushing the stage, knocking him down, and then disappearing backstage, obviously pleased.

A preoccupied young man encounters a woman with shopping bags, politely returns her beret, and receives an unusual form of thanks. A game of arm wrestling between a serious, upright contender and his drunken opponent turns into an almost mythic contest of wills before the seedy man resorts to a trick. A trainer is punched by the young athlete he's coaching; overcome by remorse, she kisses him, whereupon he ridicules her. A woman dancing in a nightclub is approached by a man who seems worried by her independent style; she at first appears to rebuff him before they develop an odd sort of rhythm together. An extremely agitated man, apparently (but not certainly) the groom, flees into a garden pursued by a bride who tries, with difficulty, to soothe him with a kiss.

The palette is rather muted in these films, which makes you notice pops of color--a red-and-black dress opposed to a stark white one; yellow ticker tape; a red coat and red lips against skin of extreme pallor; green tape near a microphone stand; a demure pink dress (which turns out, however, to be nearly backless); a stiff, metal-gray skirt worn by a tryster; a white wristband. There are odd pairings, too, in which the couples don't match in size (the man is small and the woman is enormous), or the woman is almost as masculine in clothes and appearance as the man. This might suggest gender reversals, if looked at symbolically.

I found 9 Kisses to be unsettling rather than playful, and many of the scenes resonated, as if I'd seen the characters before. This may very well have been the intent of the director, who wants the viewer to look for the emotional heart of each scene, in which a kiss is merely a stand-in for a variety of transactions, from personal to political. There are many puzzles to be worked out: What are those two men really fighting about? (And are they really both men?) What's behind that pale look of surprise? Does the backseat of that car represent something else? Who are those sparring partners? What's the man at the wedding running away from? I think the film reads more like a parade of the Seven Deadly Sins than a series of romantic idylls, more like Dante's Inferno than Love, Actually, and perhaps that, if you care to go there, is the point.

The link to 9 Kisses is here. If you'd like to learn more about the making of the film, see this short feature with a behind-the-scenes look at the director and actors at work and decide for yourself if a kiss is still a kiss.