Because explicit sexuality is as old as the medium itself, the primary challenge for filmmakers has been finding a way to incorporate it into artistically meaningful films. This was clearly Winterbottom’s aim, and the ultimate failure of 9 Songs shouldn’t come as much of a surprise considering that virtually every filmmaker who has explored this particular terrain has met with a similar fate.

The idea almost took root in the early 1970s, when “porno chic” was all the rage and hard-core filmmakers like Gerard Damiano (Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones) could be hailed as “auteurs.” The desire to find a way to incorporate hard-core footage into a legitimate film even tempted the likes of Stanley Kubrick, who in an interview with a French magazine in 1971 confessed that he was fascinated with the idea of making a big-budget hard-core film with known stars. The simultaneous pinnacle and low point of such thinking was Caligula (1980), the enormously expensive hard-core epic directed by Tinto Brass and funded by Penthouse magnate Bob Guccione. Since that film flopped, a few filmmakers have made inroads, particularly French filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat, whose 1999 film Romance caused a significant stir, albeit not significant enough to encourage others to follow her path.

Michael Winterbottom has been one of Britain’s most interesting directors, having made numerous button-pushing films of different generic stripes over the past decade, including an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude (1996) and the brutal reality-check Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). According to a BBC interview, when he decided to make 9 Songs, “he was motivated by a desire to ‘show people making love, so that we can see a relationship being told through two people being intimate together.’” An interesting idea, but one that is fundamentally flawed because there is no way to see a relationship told in all its complexity only through physicality, which is all we see in 9 Songs. The film is brutally boring and monotonous because the relationship is limited in virtually every respect to what the couple does together physically.

The title refers to the fact that the film is divided into nine segments, each of which features a live performance by a British rock band (including Franz Ferdinand, The Dandy Warhols, and The Von Bondies). These musical segments are then intercut with scenes involving Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley) engaging in various sexual activities in his apartment. There is no connection between the music and the sex except for the fact that they are both shot on gritty digital video, which provides a sense of immediacy that is at first intriguing, but, like the rest of the film, is ultimately tedious. Winterbottom avoids both concert-film and porn clichés by giving 9 Songs a sense of documentary-like thereness (the concert scenes are shot largely from a spectator’s point of view and the sex scenes are sporadic and unchoreographed), but it isn’t enough to sustain interest in the failed experiment.

The entire film takes place over a summer because Lisa is a traveling American, and at the beginning we learn from Matt’s voice-over narration that it has ended. He is a scientist who has since gone to Antarctica to conduct research, and Winterbottom invests the same destylized approach to his depiction of the icy wasteland that he uses to show the sex and music. The fact that we know the relationship has ended should lend an air of poignancy to the couple’s scenes together, but it doesn’t because we learn virtually nothing about them beyond the physical details of their sexual activities. There are a few brief conversations (mostly banal) and at least one argument, but there is never any sense of the spiritual connection between them, which leaves the viewer no other choice than to assume that there isn’t one. Winterbottom has said that he wanted to depict a “love story,” but all he gives us is sex, and that is simply not enough.

Copyright ©2005 James Kendrick

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