REVIEW: 9 Songs [2005]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 71 minutes
Release Date: March 11th, 2005 (UK) / July 22nd, 2005 (USA)
Studio: Optimum Releasing / Palisades Tartan
Director(s): Michael Winterbottom
Writer(s): Michael Winterbottom

Now she’s gone and love burns inside me.

Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. That pretty much epitomizes the film 9 Songs. Michael Winterbottom is a director who’s never shied from genre hopping or controversy and he accomplishes both with this explicit romance consisting of concert footage and sexual intercourse with a little story thrown in for good measure. More an art film than the usual fare earning theatrical releases these days—it’s 71-minute runtime is more than enough for what is being portrayed—one can only sit through the repetition of bedroom, rock venue, bedroom, etc. for so long.

Once we start to understand where these two lovers are in their respective lives, the point of the film—how love can be wonderful and isolating at the same time—comes across to lead the story to its inevitable conclusion. It’s a love affair lasting a few months while Lisa, an American, attends school in London while Matt prepares for a job studying glacial ice in Antarctica. A relationship between a young twenty-something co-ed and a thirty-something field professional, it has different meanings for both sides of the equation. No matter the results or the hardships involved, these two do love each other.

Told almost as a flashback from Matt’s point of view, we see this glaciologist feeling claustrophobic and agoraphobic amongst the snow and white at the same time. He recalls those same feelings with Lisa back home during their torrid sexual escapades. He made the most of those months by cooking for her, pleasing her in the bedroom, and having a great time on the indie music scene of London’s nightlife.

Every attempt he made to see where their future was headed, however, was met with a cold attitude that alluded to the tenuousness of their bond. He wants to spend Thanksgiving with her, but she made plans with friends for whom she assumes Matt will hate. He wants to take the step of having sex without a condom, feeling out the prospect of having children in the future, but she likes things as they are. Throughout their entire time together, Lisa never even invites him to her apartment.

They met at a concert and it brought them together with the film showing their initial affection cracking open. Whereas Matt looks to extend the relationship, he finds Lisa’s penchant for drugs and sex to be too much. Not that he isn’t enjoying himself—the two have no issues tearing each other’s clothes off at all times of the day while adding blindfolds and restraints—but her need becomes overwhelming. I don’t know why they go to a topless bar at one point, but it’s Lisa who becomes aroused by the woman gyrating on and near the couple.

She becomes so enraptured that, in an economy of shots, we watch Matt leave her there by herself as the event becomes the final straw in his acceptance of her behavior. She’s soon found pleasing herself while Matt makes supper and then decides to stay home while he goes off to a concert. He felt complete in this great big world with his love, but her lapses into drug-induced sexual stupors find him closed-off regardless of being surrounded by 5,000 people at a show. Without Lisa, he is completely alone.

Showing these feelings that love instills is Winterbottom’s goal. Without a strict narrative besides Matt’s remembrances of a few months in London with a woman he loved, the film isn’t much more than an extended NC-17 concert video. So many people will go to the trouble and say how both Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley have given brave performances, but what is really so brave? If taking off your clothes and having sex on tape is so brave, why aren’t pornstars scooping up Oscars for their portrayals onscreen? If anything, it’s because they are actually having sex in front of the camera that makes it less of a performance.

O’Brien and Stilley do have to portray a love and affection through the good and bad times while fully clothed, but once they are in bed—which is seriously two-thirds of the movie—all acting is thrown out the window for unsimulated sex. I’m not saying they do a bad job acting as I did buy into their relationship. Watching them fawn over each other at concerts or seeing how they looked at each other across the dining room table or their enjoyment roaming London towards the end. I just have a problem with people automatically praising an actor for being naked onscreen. They’re getting paid and have chosen to do it. I’m not so sure how much guts have to do with it.

And for anyone who picks up 9 Songs thinking nothing of the explicit sex warnings on the cover, know that it is as advertised. If you have any prudish tendencies at all, put the DVD down and find something else for date night. These two run the gamut of sexual activities and everything is shown. I must give credit to Winterbottom for attempting to show the highs and lows of love in such a way—keeping the sexual arousal intact as the central story point without glamorizing it for titillation as porn does. It’s definitely not for everyone, nor something I would ever really want to experience again, but it is a piece of art that doesn’t deserve to be tossed aside as a sex film without merit.

The juxtaposition of Antarctica and the pairs’ own little island together has meaning and the cross-cutting between the gyrations of rock ‘n roll fans watching their favorite bands play with the close-up sounds and sights of two people making love is effective. There are some really good bands on display too (including Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Franz Ferdinand, Elbow, and Super Furry Animals), but their performances—as well as the music’s role in the story—do get overshadowed by the controversial explicitness of the rest. Love is both unparalleled in joy and pain depending on what stage of it you find yourself. And, no matter where it leads, those parts that worked can never be forgotten.