The Sigla Blog

Sinéad Gleeson finds Michael Winterbottom’s controversial new film an exercise in pointlessness.

John Lydon of The Sex Pistols once said that love is “two minutes and 52 seconds of squelching noises”. In his new film ‘9 Songs’, Michael Winterbottom has taken Lydon’s metaphor of sexual brevity and padded it out to about 35 minutes of sex, and 20-something minutes of music. The rest of it is filler but cumulatively it’s no coincidence that the film runs to 69 minutes. If Lydon’s line juxtaposes sex and love, Winterbottom’s film is only about sex with love noticeably absent. Before coming up with this idea for ‘9 Songs’, the director was keen to adapt Michel Houellebecq’s sexually explicit novel Platform. Houellebecq broaches sexuality in his books from an aggressively male point of view, and tends towards the seedy and dysfunctional. While Winterbottom’s representation of sex here isn’t as negative, it does share some of Houellebecq’s characteristics in that it deals with power and is devoid of emotion.

The plot, if there is one, revolves around Matt who is English and Lisa, an American girl living in London. They meet at a gig and begin a relationship - or at least that’s what the press blurb says. The only on-screen indicator that they are in a relationship, is that they have a lot of sex. Real sex that is. Which is why a wave of controversy has preceded the film before its release even if Irish film censor John Kelleher took the commendable decision to pass the film uncut. I’m no prude, but the problem with the sex is that while it’s obviously real, it feels ersatz and empty. Why? Nearly every frame of the film featuring Kieran O’Brien and Margot Stilley involves them either having sex or at a gig. The audience is a complicit voyeur of such a private act, while the actors turn voyeur in the public spaces of music venues. But as one sex scene or gig follows another, we still know very little about the characters. Matt is a glacial geologist; we don’t know what Lisa does or why she’s in London. Films don’t have to present us with a back story for every character, but ‘9 Songs’ opts for the other extreme of anonymity. And this is where the core problem of the film lies. This anonymity and the one-dimensional characters resemble straightforward porn-without-a-plot. The context becomes irrelevant to the point that Matt could be a pizza delivery guy, Lisa a bored housewife in a negligee.

The film will undoubtedly resurrect the issue of pornography again especially as various reciprocal sex acts are shown in the film, but largely from a male perspective. No matter what Lisa is doing, or having done to her, she is subjugated and the film can’t seem to shake its framing visual narrative of the male gaze. It represents the male view of relationships in that so much of a man’s concept of a relationship - at its beginning, as this relationship is - is centred on the physical. The film in its simplest terms presents a male fantasy view of sex. Most heterosexual porn is made by men for men so many women who have seen the film have found nothing of erotic interest in it. For me the sexiest thing in it is Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand.

Winterbottom was certainly aiming for arthouse erotica and not nicely shot cerebral porn, but ‘9 Songs’ fails because the audience doesn’t know or care enough about the characters to be interested in the sex. Neither character is credible, particularly Lisa but it’s not just because 21-year-old Margot Stilley is a model-turned actress and this is her first role. Her inexperience as an actress is compounded by the fact that her character is clichéd on many levels. Lisa is the quintessential ‘kooky’ American chick who’s great in sack and looks like an androgynous model. Worse again is the fact that in one scene, she is seen conspicuously taking ‘her medication”, tapping into that same male fantasist view that all attractive sexually liberated women are screwed up psychopaths - but hey they’ll do anything in bed and that’s the main thing. This reinforces how men view sexually confident women and references films like ‘Betty Blue’, ‘Baise-Moi’ and ‘The Piano Teacher’. Taking the view that this is a male film is the reason why Matt is slightly more believable, even if the film is book-ended by showing us an unnecessary Arctic exhibition (we are meant to get the metaphor of leaving a hot and heavy relationship for one of the coldest places on earth). He is presented as a man beguiled by a coquettish siren that’s willing to try anything sexually.

These character flaws are most likely the result of the film not having a script. All the performances were rehearsed with Winterbottom and the dialogue is adlibbed, which may explain why nothing of interest is ever verbally exchanged between the two. Instead, these gaps are filled by the ‘9 Songs’ of the film’s title. Shot in various London venues on handheld DV cameras, there are live performances from bands like Franz Ferdinand, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Elbow, Primal Scream, The Dandy Warhols and composer Michael Nyman. Before you even hit the halfway point, you start wishing it would cut away from the tedious sex back to the music.

‘9 Songs’ is supposed to be about a couple united by a love of music and sex. It isn’t. It’s an exercise in pointlessness. Michael Winterbottom should have made straightforward pornography or expanded the characters and dialogue to give this film some sense of profundity. Instead, ‘9 Songs’ is the filmic equivalent of a one-night stand - all about the physical with absolutely no depth.

Sinéad Gleeson