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9½ Weeks

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9½ Weeks

9½ Weeks is a 1986 American erotic romantic drama film directed by Adrian Lyne, and starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. The film follows New York City art gallery employee Elizabeth McGraw (Basinger) who has a brief yet intense affair with mysterious Wall Street broker John Gray (Rourke). The screenplay by Patricia Knop, Zalman King and Sarah Kernochan is adapted from the 1978 memoir Nine and a Half Weeks by Austrian-American author Ingeborg Day, under the pseudonym "Elizabeth McNeill".

Principal photography was completed in August 1984, but the film was not released until February 1986. Considered too explicit by its American distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 9½ Weeks was heavily edited for release in the United States, where it was a box-office bomb, grossing $6.7 million on a $17 million budget. It also received mixed reviews at the time of its release. However, its soundtrack sold well and the film itself became a huge success internationally in its unedited version, particularly in Australia, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, grossing $100 million worldwide. It has also acquired a large fanbase on video and DVD and has developed a cult following.

Elizabeth McGraw, a young employee at a SoHo art gallery, meets John Gray, a Wall Street arbitrageur, at a Chinese grocer, and later at a flea market where he buys her an expensive shawl. They start dating, but John's strange behavior escalates, and he gives her an expensive gold watch with instructions to think about him touching her at noon every day. Elizabeth masturbates at work at the designated time.

Elizabeth wants to introduce John to her friends, but he only wants to see her in the evenings and tells her to see her friends during the day. One evening, she is alone in his apartment and finds a photo of him with another woman. When John calls and asks if she went through his things, she admits it. He threatens to punish her, and returning home, he orders her to face the wall for a spanking. Elizabeth tries to leave, but the door is locked. John slaps her, she slaps him back and hits him repeatedly, and he has aggressive sex with her. Despite this, Elizabeth falls in love with John and starts to enjoy his dominant behavior.

John takes control of all aspects of Elizabeth's life, from what she wears and eats to how he brushes her hair and feeds her. Elizabeth becomes increasingly dependent on John, losing her sense of self. One day, she follows John to work and brings him lunch, telling him she wants to be "one of the guys". John arranges for her to cross-dress for a rendezvous at a bar at the Algonquin Hotel, but after they leave, they are mistaken for a gay couple and attacked by a group of thugs in an alley. Elizabeth stabs one of the attackers in the buttocks, and they flee. Aroused by the incident, Elizabeth declares her love for John, takes off her dinner suit and has sex with him under a leaking drainpipe.

John starts to make their BDSM-style relationship more apparent in public. He dares her to shoplift a necklace, and she does so. At the bedding section in Bloomingdale's, he asks Elizabeth to "spread your legs for daddy" in front of the saleswoman. At an equestrian store, he whips Elizabeth on the leg with a riding crop, which he buys. Later that evening, Elizabeth performs a striptease with the crop at John's apartment.

One day, John asks Elizabeth to crawl and pick up money as he throws it on the floor of his apartment. Elizabeth initially obliges but then objects, and John threatens to hit her with his belt. Elizabeth cries and protests, but John continues to insist that she crawl and pick up the money. She eventually does so before throwing the money in John's face and declaring that she hates the game. Elizabeth feels confident at home with John, but she becomes withdrawn at work and thinks about her ex-husband Bruce, who starts dating her co-worker and roommate Molly. She goes to the countryside to visit an elderly artist named Matthew Farnsworth and secure an exhibit.

Elizabeth meets John at a room at the Hotel Chelsea and is asked to wear a blindfold. John touches her briefly before a South American prostitute enters the room and caresses Elizabeth as John observes. Elizabeth becomes nervous, and the prostitute removes her blindfold. When John takes the prostitute to the next room and starts undressing her, Elizabeth hits him and flees. John follows her to an adult entertainment venue where Elizabeth starts kissing the man next to her during a live sex show. John approaches her, and they embrace.

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