Michael Winterbottom’s restless experimentalism results in this film that is, like much cutting-edge cinema of recent years, more about the study of the mood, behaviour, and texture of an event – here, fucking, to be precise – rather than narrative or drama. It portrays an event that happens every day but very rarely makes it to the cinema screen, and if it does, it’s usually in some asinine rom-com line where characters talk about relationships that were purely sexual. Well, here’s what one such relationship looks like: Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley play the pair of young, fit, but not especially beautiful or charming characters who meet at a rock concert, screw, go to more rock concerts, screw some more, dabbling with kink, and then finally break up when lust exhausts itself. The powerful, embracing, communal stimulation of great rock music – including kick-ass performances by Franz Ferdinand and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – contrasts the delicate, grappling, intimate stimulation of the couple’s affair, and indeed, the emotion of the concerts becomes a stand-in, a surrogate place to expend the feeling they can’t approach in the bedroom.
It’s something of the anti-Brief Encounter, intricately related to that film as a portrait of a go-nowhere romance, but where the older film presented a love affair that was entirely emotional and done in by the impossibility of consummating it, this relationship is entirely built around sex, whilst both characters are utterly devoid of intellectual or emotional communcation. It seems that O’Brien feels more about the relationship than Stilley does – she has just as intimate, if not more so, a relationship with her vibrator, and the whole scene is essentially a holiday fling for her – and he meditates, in the future, as he explores Antarctica, upon their time together. When sex is commodified in hideous, dishonest, plasticised horrors like Sex and the City, 9 Songs, in its dispassionate directness, achieves an ironic distance that both legitimizes its own bald perspective as well as making a deft critique. 9 Songs doesn’t live up to other explorations of sexual affairs like Last Tango in Paris and A Pornographic Affair despite being more visceral, but to a large extent that’s missing the point – it’s about its visceral meditation.
