NINE (Broadway) full plot description with spoilers?

[AndAllThatJazz22]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 9:40pm

I've watched the trailer a trillion times now. The movie looks so f*cking incredible it's insane. I've heard a few tunes and I LOVE LOVE LOVE them, but I can't find a full plot description with all the spoilers. Does anyone have a link to one?

[Yankeefan007]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 10:08pm

There's absolutely nothing to spoil - there's no linear plot.

Guido Contini is about to turn 40. He's to start his newest film, what is supposed to be his magnum opus, but he has director's block. He's faced with all the relationships he's had with his women - his deceased mother, his unhappy wife, his mistress (whom his wife knows about) his muse, the prostitute who took his virginity. He betrays them all to set forth the plot of his film in motion.

[AndAllThatJazz22]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 10:14pm

Well that sounds quite interesting. I'm officially hooked.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 11:00pm

To fulfill your request... here is a detailed synopsis of the Broadway musical incarnation of NINE, which is based on Federico Fellini's 1963 autobiographical (non-musical) film "8 1/2":

Guido Contini, famous italian film director, has turned forty and faces a double crises: he has to shoot a film for which he can't write the script, and his wife of twenty years, the film star Luisa del Forno, may be about to leave him if he can't pay more attention to the marriage. As it turns out, it is the same crisis.

Luisa's efforts to talk to him seem to be drowned out by voices in his head: voices of women in his life, speaking through the walls of his memory, insistent, flirtatious, irresistable, potent. Women speaking beyond words (Overture delle Donne). And these are the women Guido has loved, and from whom he has derived the entire vitality of a creative life, now as stalled as his marriage.

In an attempt to find some peace and save the marriage, they go to a spa near Venice (Spa Music), where they are immediately hunted down by the press with intrusive questions about the marriage and -- something Guido had not told Luisa about -- his imminent film project (Not Since Chaplin).

As Guido struggles to find a story for his film, he becomes increasingly preoccupied -- his interior world sometimes becoming indistinguishable from the objective world (Guido's Song). His mistress Carla arrives in Venice, calling him from her lonely hotel room (A Call from the Vatican), his producer Liliane La Fleur, former vedette of the Folies Bergeres, insists he make a musical, an idea which itself veers off into a feminine fantasy of extraordinary vividness (The Script/Folies Berg eres). And all the while, Luisa watches, the resilience of her love being consummed by anxiety for him and a gathering dismay for their lives together (My Husband Makes Movies / Only With You).

Guido's fugitive imagination, clutching at women like straws, eventually plunges through the floor of the present and into his own past where he encounters his mother, bathing a nine year old boy -- the young Guido himself (Nine). The vision leads him to re-encounter a glorious moment on a beach with Saraghina, the prostitute and outcast to whom he went as a curious child , creeping out of his Catholic boarding school St. Sebastian, to ask her to tell him about love. Her answer, be yourself (Ti Voglio Bene / Be Italian), and the dance she taught him on the sand echoes down to the forty-year old Guido as a talisman and a terrible reminder of the consequences of that night -- punishment by the nuns and rejection by his appalled mother (The Bells of St. Sebatian). Unable to bear the incomprehensible dread of the adults, the little boy runs back to the beach to find nothing but the sand and the wind -- an image of the vanishing nature of love, and the cause of Guido Contini's artistry and unanchored peril: a fugitive heart.

Back into the present, Guido is on a beach once more. With him, Claudia Nardi, a film star, muse of his greatest successes, who has flown in from Paris because he needs her. But this time she doesn't want the role. He cannot fathom the rejection. He is enraged. He fails to understand that Claudia loves him too, but wants him to love her as a woman 'not a spirit' -- and he realizes too late that this was the real reason she came -- in order to know. And now she does. He can't love her that way. And she is in some way released to love him for what he is, and never to hope for him again. Wryly she calls him "My charming Casanova!" thereby involuntarily giving Guido the very inspiration he needs and has always looked to her for. As Claudia lets him go with "Unusual Way", Guido grasps the last straw of all -- a desperate, inspired movie -- a 'spectacular in the vernacular' -- set on "The Grand Canal" and cast with every woman in his life.

The improvised movie is a spectacular collision between his real life and his creative one -- a film that is as self-lacerating as it is cruel, during which Carla races onto the set to announce her divorce and her delight that they can be married only to be brutally rejected by Guido in his desperate fixation with the next set-up, and which climaxes with Luisa, appalled and moved by his use of their intimacy -- and even her words -- as a source for the film, finally detonating with sadness and rage. Guido keeps the cameras rolling, capturing a scene of utter desolation -- the women he loves, and Luisa who he loves above all, littered like smashed porcelain across the frame of his hopelessly beautiful failure of a film. "Cut. Print!"

The film is dead. The cast leaves. They all leave. Carla, with "Simple" -- words from the articulate broken heart, Claudia with a letter from Paris to say she has married, and Luisa in a shattering exit from a marriage that has, as she says, been 'all of me' (Be On Your Own).

Guido is alone. "I Can't Make This Movie" ascends into the scream of "Guido out in space with no direction,' and he contemplates suicide. But, as the gun is at his head, there is a final life-saving interruption -- from his nine year old self (Getting Tall), in which the young Guido points out it is time to move on. To grow up. And Guido surrenders the gun. As the women return in a reprise of the Overture (Reprises), but this time to let him go, only one is absent. Luisa. And Guido feels the aching void left by the only woman he will ever love. In the 2003 Broadway production, as the boy led the women off into his own future to the strains of "Be Italian", Luisa stepped into the room on the final note, and Guido turned towards her -- this time ready to listen.


Here is the cast of the 2009 film adaptation of the Broadway musical NINE:

Daniel Day-Lewis -- Guido Contini
Marion Cotillard -- Luisa Contini
Penelope Cruz -- Carla Albanese
Judi Dench -- Liliane La Fleur
Nicole Kidman -- Claudia Nardi
Kate Hudson -- Stephanie Necrophuros
Sophia Loren -- Mamma
Stacy "Fergie" Ferguson -- Saraghina



Updated On: 5/15/09 at 11:00 PM

[MrSweetNAwful]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 11:41pm

what was the character of Lina Darling's part in the musical? I only ask cuz I just realized Little Nell played her in the revival. Does she have a solo of any kind?

[jovie27]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 11:48pm

Does anyone know where I can hear more of the music from the movie?
Updated On: 5/16/09 at 11:48 PM

[ljay889]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 11:53pm

Hmm. Buy one of the 3 cast recordings?

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 5/15/09 at 11:53pm

As clearly shown in the synopsis, Lina Darling isn't a major character in the musical whatsoever therefore she does not sing any solos... she only sings in the ensemble numbers. She is basically one of the few ensemble characters and nothing else.

[MrSweetNAwful]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 12:22am

Wow, kinda shocking. I mean it's not like Nell's a superstar with a well known name or anything (aside from being a supporting character in the number one cult film and a third rate recording artist) but she has some recognition, I wonder why she only landed a chorus part.

Updated On: 5/16/09 at 12:22 AM

[TalkinLoud]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 12:27am

I think you should watch 8 1/2.

[RagzJr]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 1:03am

Sorry to stray from the subject for just a moment, but which recording do you suggest for a Nine newcomer? OR, which is your favorite recording?

[CATSNYrevival]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 1:27am

Obviously, you need to get the original cast recording eventually, but I heard the revival recording first and it was the production that really made me fall in love with the show so I would suggest that one. The live Tokyo cast recording is also a lot of fun, but not for your first.

[chiuptown]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 7:28am

I love the OBC recording I have on vinyl. But I tend to listen (and love) the most, the London Concert Cast Recording, with Jonathan Pryce and Elaine Paige. It was a one time event in 1992, and featured a massive chorus.

[rosscoe(au)]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 7:44am

The revival recording is nothing special, try the OBC and the Australian cast recording, both wonderful.

[AndAllThatJazz22]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 9:33am

WOW! Thanks so much BrodyFossee123!!

[AndAllThatJazz22]

Posted: 5/16/09 at 9:36am

PS. Jovie, I got your PM (I can't reply because it's telling me you don't accept PM's). I'm afraid you misunderstood me, I haven't heard any songs from the movie (other than 'Be Italian' in the trailer), but on YouTube, there are a few songs from the Original London Cast recording that are very impressive.