9 Songs (2004)

Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs arrives from 2004, a year when a British art film could still generate controversy purely through the mechanics of unsimulated intercourse. The premise is spare to the point of austerity: a glaciologist named Matt, stationed in Antarctica, recalls a months-long affair with an American exchange student named Lisa, the memory structured around nine live rock performances. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club opens and closes the proceedings. Between the gigs, the couple has sex, consumes cocaine, and has more sex.

The film was, by the standards of its moment, scandalous. Ann Widdecombe raised it in the House of Commons. Australia wrestled with its classification. And yet, viewed through the lens of contemporary cultural expectation, the film offers nothing in the way of a message. There is no critique of the male gaze, no reckoning with power, no argument about anything. The camera observes two attractive white people in various states of undress, and the film asks us to find meaning in the accumulation. The strip club sequence gestures toward something, then declines to pursue it. The nudity is erotic, not political. The bodies on display are conventional, and no effort is made to complicate that.

What remains is an exercise in style, and a modest one. Winterbottom's interest lies in texture: the blur of concert lights, the geography of a shared flat, the cold remove of the Antarctic frame. The film does not lecture, does not advocate, does not organize its images around any social thesis. It is, in the end, a document of a particular moment in British cinema, when transgression meant showing what had not been shown before. That the transgression now reads as merely quaint is perhaps the most interesting thing about it.