9 Songs

Herald rating: *

This needlessly controversial film, which both lyrically and very explicitly depicts a brief affair, is scarcely obscene. If anything it's a little coy. It's also astonishingly boring except perhaps for people who haven't seen genitals before.

In Wonderland, Welcome To Sarajevo and In This World, to name my favourites, British director Winterbottom has shown an adventurous intellect and created characters of flesh and blood. Not here.

His two lovers, Matt and Lisa meet at a gig in Brixton, go home and have (real, not simulated) sex. They do so repeatedly, energetically and inventively, pausing only to have brief, incomplete conversations or go to other rock concerts.

Matt's a glaciologist, a fact that Winterbottom exploits to tiresomely symbolic effect, and Lisa has a bar job. But we learn nothing else about them other than their sexual habits. Few scenes last more than a couple of minutes and fade to black whenever things get interesting - not the sex which quickly palls, but the conversation.

The songs of the title (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Dandy Warhols, Primal Scream) may be intended as some form of commentary on the action but the words are indecipherable.

Even outside the concert sequences, where it might have been excused, the lighting is dim and the image grainy - to judge from the camera's athleticism it was shot on digital video and the blow-up to 35mm has not been kind. But close-up silhouetting and the generous helping of slurping and squelching sounds remove most ambiguities.

For people who enjoy watching others have sex, there may be something on offer here. But it's nothing new: Patrice Chereau's Intimacy springs to mind, as do the tens of thousands of films pumped out by the porn business.

Their ambitions are different, of course. But at least their point is plain. This film's isn't.

CAST: Kieran O'Brien, Margo Stilley
DIRECTOR: Michael Winterbottom
RATING: R18, explicit sex, drug use
RUNNING TIME: 69 minutes
SCREENING: Rialto