MOVIE REVIEW : MASOCHISTIC LOVE AFFAIR IN ‘9 1/2 WEEKS’

There may well have been a movie in “9 1/2 Weeks” (selected theaters), a woman’s pseudonymous “memoir” of a masochistic love affair that became too dangerous for even her to endure. At its most powerful, it was a disturbing portrait of the obliteration of the self by an all-consuming passion.

But to tell that story, you’d have to tell it. And to make it anything more than a pair of chic Manhattanites playing with pain, humiliation and being out of control, you’d have to do what the author couldn’t: Give us some indication of the forces in her life that left her vulnerable to such treatment. Make her a real person.

Nothing like that has happened. Sanitized for our protection and in the hands of director Adrian (“Flashdance”) Lyne, “9 1/2 Weeks” is a swooningly silly cautionary tale about the bad (Mickey Rourke) and the beautiful (Kim Basinger); a pair whose sexual tastes might have surfaced after a night of watching “Bolero” on videocassette.

Each has sighted the other warily in the SoHo district near her art gallery job, but it’s his first move, buying a pricey antique shawl he has watched her covet at a flea market; wrapping her in it with the words, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She might be more warned as he takes her out to an isolated houseboat the afternoon they meet, begins to make up the bed with fresh white sheets and, as music to lull a lady by, puts on Billie Holiday’s recording of “Strange Fruit.”

What kind of man lures with those indelible lyrics about the bitter fruit of lynched black men found hanging on Southern trees, with “the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth”? One who will soon be trickling ice cubes down her clavicle and meticulously snapping riding crops to pick the one with exactly the right cut to it, that’s what kind. But if handcuffs and riding crops were part of the original film--part of Basinger’s perilous descent into totally out of control--they remain only in cutesy residue, when Basinger performs a striptease for her lover, dangling the cuffs from the crop for one second.

The screenplay is now the work of three people, husband-and-wife team Patricia Knop and Zalman King and Sarah Kernochan, and, at the very kindest, it can be reported that they have an odd notion of realspeech. They have sort of sand-blasted the dialogue between Basinger and Rourke so that nothing original should stick up and mar the numbing flow, and what they have put in the mouth of the film’s one accredited “artist,” an elderly reclusive painter, is boggling. Did he remember he had a major show coming in less than a month, he’s asked? “I remember to eat when I’m hungry and I remember to sleep when I’m tired,” he replies. Sure. Artist-speak. You’d recognize that in a minute.

This film, which had to get into emotional riptides if it was ever going to work, now blows bubbles in a wading pond. Pretty ones, to be sure. Lyne, if anything, is adept at prettiness. He has a fashion photographer’s eye for exquisitely tickled atmosphere, whether it’s a creep-infested SoHo art opening, the shared apartment of a pair of career women or the chrome- and-black-leather minimalism of Rourke’s apartment.

Lyne’s notion of eroticism looks like an Irving Penn staging of a food fight, and his notion of a woman’s anger (at being stranded, in tears, on top of a Ferris wheel) has Basinger chasing Rourke girlishly, pummeling him with balloons. A genuinely dangerous situation--when a carload of rednecks intent on mayhem chase them through late-night streets--turns adorable as Basinger puts away a tough with a stab and a squeal.

Even when Lyne uses decent music like Randy Newman’s paean to original choice, “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” he blows it. Instead of Newman’s slyly peculiar delivery on the lines “They don’t knooooow what love is,” which would certainly resonate here, they’ve used Joe Cocker’s version, and it ain’t the same, it ain’t the same.

Rourke wears only one expression, a mildly interested quizzicalness. It’s there whether he is having his fingers explicitly sucked at the bar of an all-male Wall Street restaurant, or pouring gallons of milk over his lover in a white-on-white love scene. Basinger is not only tremulous and touching, she manages a certain beautiful equilibrium, which under the circumstances is downright miraculous.