Phone Booth Scene from “9½ Weeks”

One thing I could have used a little more of in the phone booth scene from “9½ Weeks” was… the phone booth! Amid vanishing-into-focus headlights it made a suitably noir appearance, revealing itself as a New York City phone booth in a nondescript part of town. Another payphone enclosure lurks in the not-so-far distance. The phone booth shows up again for just a few seconds. But mostly we are left with the idea of the phone booth and not its haunting visual image.

I am not complaining about Kim Basinger’s magnificently vulnerable countenance filling the screen for most of this 94-second segment. But maybe the telephony of the moment, the sound-only back-and-forth between her and Mickey Rourke, would have benefited from an appropriate complement of visual alternation between her and the physical reality of the voice coming through the telephone.

The light playing off and on Basinger’s face is magnificent.