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9 Songs: Michael Winterbottom
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Shot in digital video with a tiny crew and a speaking cast of just two, and composed almost entirely of live concert footage and sex scenes, '9 Songs' is an experiment in reductive narrative. Its basic storyline - guy meets girl, they have a relationship and then split up - is so familiar from real life as well as from countless films that director Michael Winterbottom can afford to dispense with any peripheral details and get right down to what is most essential in Matt's memory. Bold as this strategy may be, it is more than a mere exercise in formalism - for the film's Antarctic frame orients its viewers as geologists, and reveals the evolution of a relationship in tightly focussed cross-sections which not only encapsulate the most heightened moments of connection between the lovers, but ... expose all the tell-tale signs of fissure, fatigue and encroaching chill. Exploring the lonely voids of the Antarctic produces, as Matt puts it, "claustrophobia and agoraphobia in the same place, like two people in a bed" - and he seems unsure whether sex and music are enough to stave off, however briefly, the icy cold of human existence.
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Given what a potential provocation the film could have been, the conceit of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs is admirable simplicity itself. Matt (Kieran O’Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley) have a meet-cute at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club concert at Brixton Academy in London, after which they retire to his quarters for some exuberant shagging, an event that Matt, not surprisingly, looks back on fondly. Over the course of the film, we’ll see eight other concerts interspersed throughout Matt’s memories of their relationship, which focus mostly on the copious amounts of sex they had, with the occasional scrap of conversation tossed in. And that’s it, music and sex.
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By telling its narrative through the elements which the mainstream would deem as ephemera, 9 Songs sets itself up as an undoubtedly experimental work. Director Michael Winterbottom hopes to communicate a love story solely through real, unsimulated sex, inane chitchat and the nine songs of the title as performed by various bands in person and (almost always) in their entirety. As such the film is hardly an epic like a number of his works - only two actors as opposed to the multi-character intricacies of Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People; digitally shot present day setting as opposed to the bigger budget recreations of the past found in Jude and The Claim - an aspect ... reflected in its length. Indeed, the 66 minute running time again points towards its experimental nature - this feels more like a side project than a genuine feature, something akin to the brief video pieces which Jean-Luc Godard would construct prior to his features during the eighties.
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Dear Vincent “Brown Bunny” Gallo: 9 Songs (2004) director Michael Winterbottom sees your b.j. and raises you a money shot. Taking explicit, 100% real penis-in-vagina sex to the extreme, 9 Songs is 71 minutes of hardcore copulation coupled with electrifying footage of the year’s hippest and most hyped indie bands. Matt (Kieran O’Brien) is a geologist studying glaciers in Antarctica who warms things … Become a Mr. Skin Member and get the full review
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Winner of Best Cinematography at San Sebastian, “9 Songs” is a immensely beautiful and intimate film. The most honest film to date by Winterbottom and one of the best films of the year.
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If Winterbottom can be counted on for anything it's breaking with the mainstream, and 9 Songs is about as unique as they come. It does succeed in breaking age-old taboos about real sex on screen (Chloë Sevigny's servicing of Vincent Gallo notwithstanding, which was just idiotic) and even though we come out realising that simulated sex has been serving films just fine for years, we can at least thank Winterbottom for the attempt.
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Michael Winterbottom