9 Songs Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.0

9 Songs Blu-ray Movie Review

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. What more could you ask for? Maybe characters, a story, and some redeeming value.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 3, 2010

Remember the good old days when watching porn meant skulking off to some decrepit old theater in the ungentrified part of town (to put it charitably), surreptitiously checking around to make sure no one you knew saw you pay your admission? Then came the really fun part: walking into a musty, sticky (yuck!) theater populated by the dregs of humanity. Good times. A bunch of high school buddies and I went to a porn theater “just for the fun of it” when I was probably 16 or 17, despite there being a 21 year old requirement. Let’s just say the ticket taker didn’t seem to be too worried about a police raid. A few years later, as a sort of joke, some friends took me to Deep Throat as a 21st birthday “present.” Those two incidents comprise my sum total of theatrical porn experience. Things got easier, I guess, with the advent of home video and the internet. Suddenly you didn’t have to confront the public aspect of viewing porn and that perhaps made it more comfortable for those with nagging guilt complexes. The mainstream film world has danced around explicit sexuality for decades, from the groundbreaking Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow) in 1967 to more recent efforts like Paul Thomas Anderson’s exposé of the porn industry itself, Boogie Nights. But very few mainstream releases have approached the explicitness of 9 Songs, a film which intercuts verité footage of various bands playing London clubs and arenas with unsimulated acts of intercourse and various other sexual activities by the two main characters. While that aspect may have made the movie fun to film (at least for its extremely sexually active leads), it makes for an uncomfortable and completely unerotic viewing experience, like walking into a friend’s room to find him and his girlfriend in flagrante delicto.

Yes, they occasionally do take a breather.

9 Songs was a minor cause célèbre when its 2004 theatrical release set off a storm of protest due to the explicit nature of its sexual segments. Raging debates about censorship ensued, but it’s rather funny to hear that the film aired on Dutch television without so much as a peep of protest. The straitlaced Brits who may have attended 9 Songs thinking it was a fictionalized concert documentary were probably stunned to discover, however, that while there are indeed some wonderful performances by bands like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Franz Ferdinand, The Dandy Warhols (from my very own hometown of Portland, Oregon), and, just for good measure, Michael Nyman (yes, that Michael Nyman), the bulk of the film is given over to the sexual proclivities of concert attendees Matt (Kieran O’Brien) and Lisa (Margo Stilley). Writer and director Michael Winterbottom wants us to believe this is a Work of Art with an odd framing device showing Matt exploring the frigid regions of Antarctica while remembering his year long fling with American student Lisa. What are we to make of this supposed symbolism? All I could take away from it was that a mere cold shower wouldn’t suffice for Matt and that Antarctica was the only other option.

The problem with 9 Songs is that we simply don’t care about Matt or Lisa, either separately or together. They’re two ciphers, albeit ciphers with incredibly active genitalia. They attend a concert, and then they get busy, sometimes relatively “traditionally,” at other times with bells and whistles like bondage and blindfolds. Who cares? This is one of the most resolutely asexual films in recent memory, despite being a virtual catalog of activities. Full frontal nudity and penetration barely glaze the surface of what you’ll witness in 9 Songs, that is if you can stay awake between the concert footage. Defenders of the film insist that 9 Songs can't be lumped with porn, and perhaps they're right: porn at least has no pretensions about its intent, and at least delivers some excitement in its sexual scenes.

Winterbottom does better capturing the indulgent and indolent lives of the concert goers en masse with his generally excellent concert footage. The spaced out, drugged up world of these groupies is adequately captured in a variety of strobe-lit segments that play out as a sort of grim hallucinatory counterpart to the up close and personal (way close and way personal, if you catch my drift) sexual footage. But there’s no story here, no emotional context, certainly no connection to these characters that makes an audience have an interest in, let alone care, what’s going on.

If you thought Chloe Sevigny’s “performance” in Brown Bunny stretched the limits of what an actor would do in the service of “Art” (yes, I am being ironic) to its breaking point, you may want to catch 9 Songs to see that there was evidently still a great deal of stretching that could be done. Sevigny, after an Academy Award nomination for Boys Don’t Cry, saw her reputation tarnished and her career at least temporarily sidetracked, by her Bunny work. O’Brien and Stilley seem to at least be finding television work, if nothing else, but I doubt their performances in this film will make it onto either actor’s demo reel. Autonomic responses like orgasm don’t exactly scream Stanislavski and Method Acting.

9 Songs Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Director Winterbottom is obviously going for a verité look with 9 Songs, and so we are privy to a dimly lit, very grainy and soft presentation, delivered via an AVC codec in 1080p and a 1.85:1 aspect ratio. There is nothing about this transfer that screams, or even whispers, high def, save for a brightly lit moment or two when faces (not to mention other body parts) are caught in close-up and finally reveal a wealth of detail (you know, little things like how shaven Stilley is down below, and the fact that—ahem—O' Brien isn't Jewish, so to speak). Colors are meager at best, and black levels and contrast are squishy and rob some of the concert footage of any discernable amount of visual information. This may be a slight step up from an SD-DVD, but not by much.

9 Songs Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

If you separate the concert segments from the moaning and groaning segments, the two lossless tracks provided on 9 Songs, a DTS-HD MA 5.1 and an LPCM 2.0, offer a thumping good time, with excellent fidelity and a really impressive low end. The 5.1 admirably recreates the noise and chaos of a crowded hall, and the music is brightly reproduced and well mixed into the ambient soundfield. Less noteworthy are the actually much longer non-concert segments, where we get to hear a lot of lascivious sounds anchored in the front channels. Dialogue (such as there is) is clear and crisp. But it's the music sequences that will stand out for most viewers (despite the prurient nature of the rest of the film), and the DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix especially has a lot of punch and bombast.

9 Songs Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered. I think that's a good thing.

9 Songs Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

If 9 Songs had given us something--anything--to engage us in these characters, the nonstep sex scenes might have been tolerable, if not exactly enjoyable. The concert footage here is the best thing about the film, but after a moment or two of figuring out we're about to see yet another completely explicit sex act, with no romance or excitement to boot, prayers start to waft heavenward that the music scenes never end. Unfortunately, they do.