FullMetal_Atheist Blog

Michael Winterbottom is possibly the most exciting director to emerge from the United Kingdom in the last ten years. Prolific (by U.K standards) and already responsible for an eclectic oeuvre Winterbottom seems determined not to be shoe-horned into being seen as a purveyor of any particular genre. 9 Songs follows the arc of a relationship between a young American girl and an Englishman who meet at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club gig at the Shephards Bush Empire. At the screening I attended Winterbottom introduced the film as his attempt to tell a love story minus what he considers the superfluous elements such as storyline, character development or any real narrative structure at all. What this leaves us with are a series of vignettes devoted almost entirely to the couples lovemaking, intercut with concert footage of various bands performing at the Empire (The aforementioned B.R.M.C,Franz Ferdinand etc.) by way of suggesting the passage of time. It's an audacious conceit and the hardcore sex scenes and highly physical nature of the relationship have a clear precedent in Oshima's Ai no Corrida but Winterbottom's experiment is an almost total failure. Sadly, the problem lays less with the idea and more with the execution. The dialogue (such as it is) is clichéd to the point of banality and there is a noticeable lack of both humour or passion between the two characters. The music sequences seem awkwardly slotted in to the film in order to up the running time and give the audience a brief respite from the dull and, frankly, rather ugly sex scenes. However, even these concert scenes have a listlessness to them unlike, say, the fabulous musical sequences in the directors 24 Hour Party People. Winterbottom should be commended for constantly experimenting with what can be done with film narrative but with 9 Songs it, unfortunately, feels like he's not even trying. Given his eclectic back-catalogue we could say Winterbottom has added another string to his cinematic bow - his first truly bad film.