REVIEWED - 9 SONGS: NEVER mind what the poor actors have to do. Just listen to what they have to say. Toward the close of this incandescently awful interspersion of engorged penises with moany student rock, the hero puts his clothes on and heads to the Antarctic in search of unsustainable metaphors. Hanging out on this nippy continent is, he explains, both an agoraphobic and a claustrophobic experience, "like two people in bed".
Kieran O'Brien may have felt that, after allowing the director to film him in the act of ejaculation, giving breath to the occasional fragment of pretentious poppycock constituted only a minor assault on his dignity. But still.
It seems terribly unfair of Michael Winterbottom to force those of us generally opposed to the banning of films to defend something quite so hopeless. During a famous court action against Penguin Books, EM Forster and others felt compelled to disingenuously represent Lady Chatterley's Lover, DH Lawrence's daftest book, as a staggering masterpiece. Sadly, a contemporary Forster would find it difficult to deny that 9 Songs is anything other than an indifferently acted, squalid bore.
No matter. If living with the internet has taught us anything, it is that the easy availability of footage of sexual penetration (I am informed such material is out there) does not bring social Armageddon a nanosecond closer. What reason could we possibly have for not allowing similar material to be screened in a more controlled environment? Notwithstanding the film's low quality, the Censor is to be commended for granting 9 Songs a certificate.
So, is the picture pornography? No. Most porn has some sort of plotline ("It is very hot, Mr Plumber. Loosen your overalls, why don't you?"), whereas 9 Songs simply cuts from bouncy, blotchy footage of various Brixton Academy gigs - Franz Ferdinand are reliably solid, Elbow and The Von Bondies are annoying - back to the charismatic O'Brien and the soon-to-be-forgotten Margot Stilley doing what men and women do.
Winterbottom's purpose is, I would guess, to express the progress of a relationship purely in terms of the way the couple in question have sex. There are a few banal examples where he succeeds - Stilley and O'Brien grow apart, she masturbates, ho hum - but for the most part the sex scenes seem pretty interchangeable. This may be because the illumination is so sepulchral that it is often difficult to discern exactly what is going on. Art makes do with natural light, you understand. Porn does not.
