If music is the food of love then 9 Songs ought to be a feast, replete as it is with sex and rock’n’roll. What Michael Winterbottom has created, however, is not the ode to hedonism that some will seek and others will recoil from. It is more complicated than that, and much bleaker.
Structured around nine concerts, the film divides its time between explicit sex and concert footage of Brit-rock staples such as Franz Ferdinand and Primal Scream. With little assistance from dialogue, the sex and songs chart four months in the lives of Matt and Lisa (Kieran O’Brien and Margo Stilley) as they navigate the well-worn path from first exuberant encounters to the disputes and compromises of an established partnership.
The sex is, in fact, the least intimate, least engaging part of the movie. In contrast to the boisterous atmosphere of the Brixton Academy, which draws the film’s audience into the communal, public exhilaration of a rock concert, the intimacy of the bedroom remains strangely inaccessible to the camera’s gaze.
What remains obscure is the precarious emotional chemistry upon which their relationship depends: without a linking narrative, the isolated scenes of delight and exasperation convey an extreme sense of transience and capriciousness. The bonds that tie the couple together could whither at any moment, and so for all the sexual and musical ecstasy of this film - and the moments of great tenderness in between - the bleak threat of loneliness is never far below the surface.