Little Moments

9 Songs Directed by Michael Winterbottom

By Matt Zoller Seitz

It will be fun to watch critics pretend to be loftily bemused, and not the slightest bit aroused, by Michael Winterbottom's sexual drama 9 Songs, then dismiss it as pretentious, empty and un-erotic. That's the standard American response to films of this type-which is to say, films that are specifically and unapologetically about sex, portray it in a physically and emotionally explicit way (there's oral sex, penetration and ejaculation in 9 Songs), and take modest stylistic risks as they go. Winterbottom's feature satisfies all three criteria, interweaving live musical performances with shot-on-the-fly sexual encounters between a couple (Kieran O'Brien's Matt and Margo Stilley's Lisa), asking viewers to intuit the relationship's progression by observing how the lovers touch and speak to each other. (With each encounter, they grow more knowledgeable and confident, but also more introspective, and freighted with private anxiety.)

As if that weren't enough invitation to charges of being pretentious, Winterbottom dares to work in an intuitive, improvisational style (he often works handheld on Super 16mm or digital video, and doesn't know what he's going to shoot until he's shooting) that yields both gems and paste. And he behaves as if he doesn't lose sleep worrying what critics, or even regular viewers, think of his methods (or his movies). To top it all off, Winterbottom depicts his lovers as ordinary, even unremarkable people, and portrays sex not as a metaphor for something else (though you can sometimes read it that way), but first and foremost as sex, period-a means of communication, a vehicle for fantasy, a normal, healthy and, yes, banal activity that free-willed adults can take part it (and that moviegoers can observe, movies being inherently voyeuristic) without guilt. This last quality is the most important aspect of 9 Songs, perhaps the only aspect that could be considered radical. Purely in terms of explicit content, Winterbottom's opus isn't doing anything new. Commercial cinema has periodically flirted with graphic or near-graphic sex for about 40 years now, each time prompting entertainment trend-ites to declare a revolution. (The latest revolution centered on Base Moi, Intimacy, Romance and the like-as if 1975's In the Realm of the Senses never happened.)

But what is new, or at least distinctive, is Winterbottom's nonjudgmental and even affectionate attitude toward his characters and their sexual relationship. This is not a Dark Night of the Soul movie; the lovers aren't punished for having-and enjoying-sex. When their relationship sours, as most relationships do, the movie doesn't blame society or the church or the war or anything else; in fact, it doesn't attach any grand importance to it at all. It treats sex as sex, and a relationship as a relationship; even the movie's framing device, which sees Matt joining a research mission to Antarctica and musing in voice-over on the continent's physical properties and metaphoric potential, Winterbottom's gently nonjudgmental tone suggests that we should take Matt's observations with a grain of salt, because they're not profound poetic insights, but one man's fumbling attempt to make sense of a defunct affair that once consumed him.

Winterbottom's filmmaking style is by nature hit-and-miss. From Jude through Welcome to Sarajevo to The Claim and Wonderland (the kitchen sink ensemble drama, not the Val Kilmer movie), he's always worked intuitively, devising action, dialogue and camera positions in the moment. (Wong Kar-Wai works the same way, though he has a better eye.) Except for Jude, Winterbottom has never made a movie that didn't strike me as unfinished or even half-baked, and some of the have been train wrecks. (The gold rush epic The Claim made you think of Fitzcarraldo and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, without being a tenth as profound or beautiful as either.)

But it would be a mistake to describe Winterbottom as a director who enjoys making movies so much that he never stopped to ask why he makes them. On the contrary, he has a very distinctive, purposeful esthetic-it just happens to be one with a success-to-failure ratio that rarely climbs higher in anyone's favor than 50-50. Despite varying budget levels, all his films have a certain immediacy; they feel like documentaries with actors, and they capture little, truthful moments most films skip. (Cassavetes and James Toback also work this way, and are similarly erratic.)

The movie's style is elliptical and dreamy, but the intent is direct and humane. It aims not to tell you a commercially approved story, or to issue grand statements about sex and its relationship to this or that topic, but simply to get your imagination going with a series of images and situations. By alternating sex scenes and snippets of live musical performance, 9 Songs draws direct comparisons between music and sex, activities that focus one's attention in and on the moment, while simultaneously allowing the mind to roam, to link the past, present and future, and imaginatively connect the world to one's own daily life.

Winterbottom's leisurely, attentive, almost real-time approach to both the concert footage and the sex scenes reminds us that in movies, both activities are often portrayed in a rushed, edited, packaged, inherently false way; they're depicted as purely goal-directed (i.e., get through the set list, or get to the climax); to that end, movie sex scenes often clear away little moments that don't get us closer to the "goal." In movies, musicians are rarely shown rehearsing or warming up, and lovers in the bedroom are rarely shown having oral sex that isn't glossed over quickly so the participants can move on to penetration. Movie sex is nearly always a blandly mystical event. You rarely hear the sounds of people kissing, much less other physical sounds. To abstract the event even further, the filmmakers dissolve from moment to moment very quickly and crank up the music.

For the most part, Winterbottom rejects these distancing devices. The result is a sex movie comprised of feelings and moments most sex movies habitually skip. We see the lovers having sex when they're both enjoying it, and when only one of them is really into it; we see them joke around before and after, drink and do lines of coke, dance, tease each other, improvise their way through fantasy scenarios and mime violent gestures such as choking and blinding. (You never see mentally healthy sex partners play around that way in movies, only disturbed, dangerous characters who are clearly headed for self-destruction.) By keeping the camera close to Lisa and Matt, and watching them literally make up each encounter as they go, Winterbottom gets closer to the physical truths of sex than more outwardly driven, dark, "edgy" films have managed. 9 Songs is radical in its sweetness, its emotional openness, its refusal to be embarrassed by anything it shows us, and its determination to be nothing more than a set of cinematic suggestions to feed our own private imaginings. "Forget where you are," Matt tells a blindfolded Lisa, oiling her up during a massage parlor fantasy. "Forget who you are." That's what music asks of us. Movies, too.