9 Songs (Winterbottom, 2004): UK

Reviewed by Richard Feilden.  Viewed on DVD

When Ian Dury belted out “Sex and drugs and Rock and Roll” he could easily have been singing about Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. This controversial 2004 film from the director of A Mighty Heart covers all three bases, with an emphasis on the sex and rock’n’roll. It shocked audiences (particularly outside of Europe) with explicit scenes of unsimulated sex, intercut with footage of bands playing in famous London concert venues. Recounting twelve months in a stormy relationship between a British glaciologist and an American student it doesn’t really go anywhere, but taken as a slice of life it offers up enough to be interesting, if not entirely captivating.So what do we get? We get 69 minutes (an unnecessary joke on the director’s behalf) of grainy footage following Matt (Kieran O’Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley) as they share their passions and problems. Whilst it has been condemned by some critics for a lack of clarity (Roger Ebert going so far as to complain about a lack of close-ups in the concert footage) I found it to be refreshingly candid, capturing the world that Matt and Lisa inhabit perfectly. This was the world as these characters saw it. The grain lent their sex an honesty unseen in either Hollywood’s ‘kiss, breasts, bum, simultaneous-orgasm, morning after with the magic L-shaped-sheet’ scenes or pornography’s brightly lit, male gaze oriented exercises in titillation. It felt like the early sex of a lust fuelled relationship. Equally the blurry long shots of the concert footage took me back to nights spent jammed into smoke filled rooms, a grin on my face as I dodged the flailing feet of crowd surfers and tried to keep hold of my jack and coke as I bounced up and down to a beat so loud it threatened to change the rhythm of my heart. If Winterbottom had used a dozen cameras flying about on cranes and given us a sumptuous 7 channel mix straight from the desk it would have been far prettier, far more a demonstration of the talent on stage, and far less real. Real is what this film is about. Anything less and it would have fallen apart far faster than it did.

Unfortunately fall apart it does. Around the 45 minute mark I started to check the clock, wondering how much more there was to go. Winterbottom does not display the ability of a film maker like Wong Kar Wai, who can keep your attention for two hours with almost nothing going on. As Matt and Lisa’s relationship bounces from the good times to bad and back again there is too little to keep you interested. With what seemed like little more than a couple of dozen lines of dialogue between them we never really get to know these characters. The brief glimpses into their psyches come too infrequently to keep you hooked and you begin to hope that the next concert comes soon, so you can get back to the glorious Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or Primal Scream.

So I’m afraid that Mr. Winterbottom gets a ‘could try harder’ for this one. Risk taking is something that I applaud and wish I saw more often, but this one just doesn’t quite work.