Michael Winterbottom, the director of such films as Code 46 and In This World, has returned to the grainy, low-budget London that he digitally shot so memorably in the film Wonderland. In 9 Songs he explores a relationship between a young couple through the metaphors of sex and music.

Matt (O’Brian), is a young man who works for the British Antarctic Survey. His other great passions are, yes you’ve guessed it, music (indie bands) and sex (with the film’s other character, Lisa). The film opens with a beautiful and dramatic shot of Matt flying across the barren, polar, Antartic landscape. His voice over recalls his relationship with Lisa (Stilley), an American exchange student. Meeting at a gig at the Brixton Academy, the two fall swiftly in lust and into bed. The plot is very simplistic. It tells the story of the evolution of their relationship. The script tells us little about the couple. The viewer is left to fill in many of the gaps.

The stormy controversy that has surrounded the films graphic, real-time sex scenes, has had Britain’s morality police up in arms. These scenes however cannot be described as titillating whatsoever. The film has been shot with DV cameras and there is a grainy, documentary feel to it. Subsequently, it gives the viewer a claustrophobic feeling at all times during the film. This lent itself perfectly to the concert footage that interspersed the film, but I felt that after forty minutes of cunnilingus, fellatio, a little bondage and blindfolds, the metaphor of sex had begun to feel slightly labored. Make no mistake though, whilst not being pornographic, these scenes hide nothing and are very explicit.

The story is told in flashback from Matt’s perspective. His voice over describes Lisa as, “21, beautiful, egocentric, careless and crazy”. This is the only real insight we get into Lisa as very little time is wasted in fleshing her character out. Subsequently we never get a real feel of their personalities, as they are too busy having sex to do much talking.

Winterbottom has said that in making “9 Songs’, he wanted to test the possibilities of a film that could explore sex in the way that a book can. It was a heroic undertaking but one that ultimately fails due largely to the fact that a book is intimate and, in the case of erotic fiction, often written in the first person. The medium of film often struggles to take you inside the characters minds, so instead sex is reduced to a mechanical process with the audience on the outside, voyeurs peeping through the curtains.

The film’s greatest strength by far is the cinematography. The digital, grainy feel helped along by a lack of back lighting gives each scene a dark docudrama feel. It is shot mainly inside rooms and gives you a fly on the fall experience. As with any film beset by controversy, “9 Songs” will be one of the most talked about movies of this year. For that reason alone it is worth seeing. Though this is not a big budget film, it is definitely worth seeing in a cinema setting. With the advent of the digital age, more and more movies will be created in this way. The scenes depicting the Antarctic prove that a digital camera is able to capture dramatic landscapes as well as the traditional film reel. Digital cameras will allow pioneering directors to get many more films produced and in the long run give us, the public, a menagerie of cinematic experience in years to come.

9 Songs is released on 11 March at UGC cinema Didsbury. You can book tickets through the UGC website, see Link.

Go and see and form your own opinion.

words by Spencer Jacobs

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