I frequently publish reviews by my friend J. Robert Parks, who writes for a Chicago-area paper and for Paste Magazine. Parks and I see eye-to-eye on many things. Occasionally we don’t.
I’m posting this review of Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs even though I personally disagree with Parks on a few issues surrounding the film. (In short, I object to the filming of actors engaging in real sex acts, and I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone else view such footage. Because of this, I cannot in good conscience buy a ticket to this film even to review it. For the same reason, I avoided last year’s scandalous film by Vincent Gallo, The Brown Bunny.) But I respect Parks, and I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on his review of this controversial film. I encourage you to post comments.
Sex. When my friend Garth was in college, he put up a sign in the cafeteria that had the word SEX in big letters. Then beneath it, in much smaller letters, he wrote, “Now that I have your attention, I’d like to tell you about this bike I’m selling.” Much has changed in the almost twenty years since Garth manipulated the student body with irrelevant sexual references. The post-feminist backlash has made the selling of/with sex even more overt, to the place where it’s now almost omnipresent. This cheapening of sexual intimacy has been accompanied by a firestorm of debate where forces on both sides argue about how sex is portrayed on tv, magazines, and especially movies. It’s safe to say that the two sides aren’t exactly arguing, as neither appears to be listening to the other. So it is with great trepidation that I wade into this morass–to attempt to review a movie that features more sex and deals more honestly with it than any film in recent memory.
9 Songs is directed by Michael Winterbottom, who has made a name for himself as an eclectic, thoughtful filmmaker. His 2002 movie In this World, about two young Afghans trying to immigrate to England, was one of my favorites of that year, but he’s also made the science-fiction Code 46, the post-modern bio-pic 24 Hour Party People, and the winter western The Claim, just in the last five years. I caught 9 Songs at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, where it arrived with plenty of advance notoriety for its explicit sex scenes, and they are explicit (and prevalent).
The movie simply focuses on a couple, a British man (Kieran O’Brien) and an American woman (Margo Stilley), who meet at a concert and then spend much of the movie going to other concerts and having sex (not at the same time). The concert footage, nine songs worth, is fantastic. Winterbottom shoots with a hand-held camera in the midst of the crowd, so it feels like you’re a part of the concert, though with an especially good seat. He taps into the tremendous energy of the music, light show, and audience, imparting that communal feel you get when you’re part of a 5,000-person crowd all dancing and clapping in time to the music.
He then cuts to the sex, which is just one man and one woman, but because the sex is real (erections, genitalia, penetration, orgasms), its energy matches the energy of the music. Furthermore, the intense connection between these two people mirrors the connection we experience during the concert footage, reminding us that intimacy can take a number of forms. There’s also a great tenderness to many of the sex scenes; an especially nice moment in a bathtub echoes something out of the French New Wave. This stands in stark contrast to the trend of European films in recent years that also feature real sex but emphasize the brutality and emptiness of the experience. The half-joke that circulated in Toronto was that it was refreshing to see sex between two characters who actually liked each other.
But it is real sex. Between two relative strangers. Who are being filmed. And we’re watching. And this, of course, raises a whole host of moral and ethical issues. What is the difference between 9 Songs and pornography? If you believe in the sanctity of sexual intercourse (as I do), can you condone a film that required two people to participate in it? Is there a difference between directing a sex film and watching it? And what is the impact of watching such private moments in a large theater?
I don’t necessarily have thoughtful answers for all of those questions, but I can say without hesitation that 9 Songs is not pornography. Its goal is not to titillate or arouse. Yes, parts of it are erotic, but that’s intrinsic to sexuality. The fact that Winterbottom can capture even a small part of the sexual experience–revealing its joy and intimacy, vulnerability and intensity– without cheapening it is testimony to his thoughtfulness as a director.
In fact, I would argue that 9 Songs has a stronger moral foundation than the simulated sex of most R-rated movies, the voyeurism of reality tv, and the commodification of sex in contemporary advertising. Those aspects of our culture, which don’t even arouse controversy anymore, manipulate sex and debase it. They create horribly false ideas of how men and women should relate to each other. 9 Songs does almost the opposite. It reminds us of the power of sexuality as well as its vulnerability. It celebrates the intimacy of sexual intercourse and acknowledges its consequences. The sexual acts in this film don’t occur in a vacuum. They are explicit but not gratuitous. Many critics have pointed out that the man and woman don’t relate much outside of the bedroom, which is a legitimate point. But it’s also true that 9 Songs is able, in its short running time (barely 70 minutes), to chronicle the beginning, middle, and end of a relationship, and do it thoughtfully and sincerely.
I do wish the film were longer, though. I wanted to know more about these characters, to get a better sense of what moves them and why they came together and why, in the end, they drift apart. There are also a few scenes in Antarctica that are forced. Winterbottom wants to say something about isolation, but the metaphor isn’t as powerful as the metaphor of the concert. Furthermore, I agree with my friend Garth, who wished that the characters had been played by an actual husband and wife, which would’ve mitigated some, though certainly not all, of the ethical issues.
It goes without saying that 9 Songs is not for most people. No one under 18 will be admitted when it opens at the Music Box this Friday, but adults should also give deep consideration to their own experience and whether seeing something this explicit would be beneficial or harmful. Still, this is one of those provocative films that actually provoked me to think and not just to flinch. There are more than a few filmmakers who could learn from Winterbottom’s example.
(Parks gives the film four out of five stars.)
Jeffrey,
I respect you more than I could ever in my limited prose express, but after reading this column by Mr. Parks I am deeply saddened. All sex outside of the marriage bed is gratuitous. It doesn’t really matter if it is real or simulated. It doesn’t matter if the act is integral to the story. A simple allusion to sex is all that is ever needed to make the point. Keep the marriage bed Holy. This is the standard. Mr. Parks throws up an incredible smoke screen, muddying the waters is the fallacious reasoning term for what he is doing, about how sensitive the sex is and how it is nice to see two people in a movie having sex who actually like each other, but the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the pornographer is whose showing other people having sex; simulated or otherwise filming people having sex is pornography. Too quote from the Great Howard Hendrix, “And if it isn’t exiting you, you’ve got a whole nother set of problems.”
Here’s my even more limited prose:
“Um, ewww.”
Another try:
“It’s nice to be sophisticated, but it’s more sophisticated to be…”
Hmmm, not sure if that one works.
Let’s start with this:
I agree with my friend Garth, who wished that the characters had been played by an actual husband and wife, which would’ve mitigated some, though certainly not all, of the ethical issues.
What ethical issues, in particular, would have been mitigated by taking the private marital act and making it public? Especially considering that the characters portrayed by this couple apparently embark on their relationship without any sort of long-term (to say nothing of life-long) commitment?
And what about the aesthetic problem that virtually every film has faced when it features sex scenes starring a real-life couple (e.g., Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut; I have heard that a similar scene in one of those Baldwin-Basinger flicks also did not work)?
(Actually, if you can get past the excruciatingly painful rape and revenge scenes, there is a bit of bedroom intimacy in Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible between Monica Bellucci and her real-life husband, Vincent Cassel, that comes across very well on screen. But that’s a tangent, an exception that proves the rule.)
I appreciate J. Robert’s remark that most of the sexually explicit films coming out of Europe, such as Patrice Chéreau’s Intimacy, have featured characters who don’t like each other. Indeed, one of the problems with these films is that they have typically presented sex-without-a-spiritual-connection as something hollow, yet the sex they present is very very real while the spiritual connection the characters sometimes begin to build is, of course, only acting. The documentary-like realism of the sex scenes overwhelms the make-believe of the more purely dramatic scenes; and so, while these films might say on the page that there is something more real than sex, what they show on the screen is that there is nothing more real than sex.
This, I think, is one reason why sex scenes between actors who are not real-life couples tend to work better than sex scenes between actors who are real-life couples; because the actors are only actors, we can accept their sex scenes on the level of make-believe — we can accept that it is the characters who are having sex, not the actors.
It seems to me that the only way you can really watch a film like this as a movie, and accept that these actors are just having sex for the sake of their characters, etc., is if you approach the movie with a pretty low view of sex in the first place — if sex is, for you, just another biological process like eating, which people do in movies all the time; and if sex, for you, does not carry with it the connotation of making two people one flesh.
However, if you do have this higher view of sex, then you inevitably cannot watch footage like this without being taken out of the movie, and without thinking that the sex act and the two people performing it are being debased somehow.
Peter,
I think your reasoning about why non married couples are easier to watch having sex on the screen is good but it can be summed up much simpler. Watching other people have sex is wrong and the more graphic or realistic the depiction the stronger it invades are increasingly callused conscience.