Nine Songs

I cannot tell you how appalled I am by the explicit sexual content in Michael Winterbottom’s latest. There’s but one lousy cum shot, Ms. Stilley’s breasts look steamrolled flat and our central couples’ idea of kinking things up involves knee high boots and blindfolds. I mean, yawn. This might pass for filth among incredibly sheltered fifteen year olds, but really, this is coy first date stuff.
Indeed, for the life of me, live sex or no, I cannot fathom the preposterous levels of media coverage afforded this superficial doodle of a movie. Don’t we have better things to be getting along with? Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole In The Heart, an equally explicit, though far more audacious film, was released here several weeks ago and nobody reached for the smelling salts.
Mind you, Nine Songs isn’t quite as diabolical as many hysterical critics currently hunting in packs (as is their want) have suggested. As long as one enters the cinema expecting 69 minutes of blurry concert footage (including Doves and The Von Bondies), interspersed with scenes depicting grotty, naturalistic fucking, one won’t be disappointed. Bored witless, perhaps, but not disappointed.
In fairness, some of the live acts are well-served by the frequently murky camera work. The film’s revved overture with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Primal Scream’s later loved-up performance – all e-phoric pinks and slow tangled tongues – are splendid. But too often the music is purely incidental and poorly captured. The Dandy Warhols and Franz Ferdinand, in particular, look and sound like they were recorded underwater back in Robert Johnson’s heyday.
The film’s sexual content is similarly problematic. Occasionally, the unsimulated sex achieves a kind of sweet intimacy, but ultimately, the film suffers for not being pornographic enough. No, honestly. Watching a girl go to work with her Rampant Rabbit is utterly tedious without the heightened squirms and grammar of the adult film sector.
Alas, the flaws don’t stop there. Like several Winterbottom efforts, much of Nine Songs feels undercooked and quite, as it were, undone. Poor Margo Stilley – for she deserves our pity – cannot have been picked for her acting skills (or indeed her negative cup size) and the improvised dialogue is atrociously pretentious in the manner of an overwrought sixth former’s journal.
Shame, for actual dialogue could have enabled this one-note affair to be a kind of latter day La Maman Et Le Putain. Or at least a Le Putain Et Le Putain.

Running Time 69mins. Cert 18. Opens March 11th.