9 Songs

As I wrote in my review of Shortbus, I'm intrigued by the notion of combining mainstream moviemaking with explicit sex scenes. There aren't too many that do, and Michael Winterbottom's 2004 film, 9 Songs, may be the most explicit I've ever seen. The problem is, without the sex this film isn't interesting in the slightest.

With only two characters, 9 Songs runs a little over an hour. It documents the relationship between an Englishman, Matt (Kieran O'Brien) and an American girl in London, Lisa (Margo Stilley). They fuck and go to rock clubs, watching alt-rock bands like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Franz Ferdinand, and The Von Bondies (these are the nine songs of the title).

The story is told in retrospect by Matt as he studies ice in the Antarctic. He has a kind of Jean-Paul Belmondo look, while Lisa is tall and lithe. She kind of uses him, and then just decides to go back to America, but there's not much conflict, and neither character is very interesting. Supposedly the film got a standing ovation at Cannes, but that was probably for the blowjob scene.

As for the sex, it starts just peeking, in the dark, but by the end there are close-up scenes of oral sex and insertion. Stilley, on the DVD extras, says the film is not a turn-on, but she hasn't met me--it definitely moved part of me.

9 Songs illustrates some of the problems of mixing cinema and porn. One, it won't play in many theaters. Two, you have a hard time finding actors. Stilley discusses how she thought about the repercussions of appearing in the film (she still works, and I just saw her in Winterbottom's The Trip, which I will review in a couple days). A director could hire sex performers from adult films--Catherine Breillat used Rocco Siffredi in her film Romance--but frequently they can't act, and by hiring a porno star a director is almost conceding that his film is pornographic. Perhaps the most insurmountable problem is that whenever an explicit sex scene comes along the story stops dead, because we are so amazed that we are watching two actors actually fucking or sucking.

But I applaud those like Winterbottom who try. He just needed a better story and more interesting characters. Maybe someday this won't be such a big deal.