Winterbottom: 9 Songs (2004)

Michael Winterbottom’s most controversial film is about a British glaciologist (Kieran O’Brien) and an American exchange student (Margo Stilley) who meet at a concert in London and embark on a passionate sexual love affair, which seems to reach its most transcendent peaks after they immerse themselves in live music. Cutting between real, explicit sex and a snapshot of indie rock as it stood in 2004 – Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Elbow, Primal Scream, The Dandy Warhols, Super Furry Animals and Franz Ferdinand all contributed special live sets – it’s an odd mixture of art porn and concert film that in some ways feels more prescient of longform, sexually explicit music video than the kind of utopian erotic cinema it’s clearly anticipating. Although there are plenty of obligatory crotch shots inserted here and there, as well as a few forays into s&m, the most viscerally sexual moments tend to be reserved for kissing, biting, licking and pinching, all of which feels more or less cunninlingual, perpetually poising the film at the breathless threshold of oral sex, which was the rough limit of what had been depicted graphically in such a mainstream release at this time. Between the music and the sex, there’s just enough narrative to make both truly erotic, but not so much that the eroticism ever loses sight of its pornographic mission either – the scenes rarely exceed a minute or two – while the musical sequences are never anything more than brief snatches of ambient foreplay, as Winterbottom manages to catch many of these rockin' artists at their most limpid and ethereal, crystallising their various claims to New Wave or Post-Punk Revivalists, and culminating with a kind of summative performance by Michael Nyman. In an era on the verge of total internet porn saturation, it all makes for quite a charming, fragile case for cinema’s powers of erotica, as well as for erotica itself as something experienced communally or collectively, and perhaps only really available any more in the kinds of seething, orgiastic venues that Winterbottom enumerates, all of which which feel like so many indie ancestors of the pansexual happenings of the 60s, so sexual that they transcend anything as crude as mere sex. Perhaps that’s why the nicest moments are when the couple are just doing nothing naked, totally at ease with each others’ bodies – moments when it’s more like an experiment in nudist cinema than art porn, or at least only as pornographic as the naked human body is pornographic. And it’s quite refreshing and pure to see a relationship on screen that’s nothing but sexual, as devoid of charisma are the couple are profoundly uninteresting as individuals – it offsets the more porny moments with a bracing austerity that works quite beautifully with the Antarctic framing device, a perfect vehicle for Winterbottom's immaculate sense of mise-en-scene.