Hey folks, Harry here with a damn fine piece from Bobby Duprea regarding Michael Winterbottom's 9 SONGS. With the new wave of sexual repression sweeping the national airwaves here In the U.S. it seems that there is no surer way to get actors and actresses to drop their drawers than to tell them it's a shame. Personally - I can't wait for the fashion trend of 2007 when those Victorian bathing dresses come back in and we'll need a new Annette Kellerman to bring sense back to the proceedings. Anyway, Winterbottom has made a film that is quite explicit - and frankly - what's the big deal? Shouldn't films made for adults contain the elements of adult life? And shouldn't that material be allowed to be shown and advertised so adults can make that decision? It's insane that we're back to this debate again... but then, that's why Brian Grazer is betting on his doc, INSIDE DEEP THROAT - it really is quite timely. Here ya go... once again the struggle with repression continues...
9 SONGS comes back to Europe
Eight months after it was the sensation of Quentin’s Cannes festival, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs (put that way, it sounds like a fart movie) is making ready to return to France – opening for business (over-eighteens only) from March 2.
The running time remains 69 (oh ho!) minutes but apparently there’s been some tiny cuts since Cannes. For example, the ejaculation that all tabloid roofs were raised about is now mere ejaculate, lying (not flying) on the hero’s chest.
But the power remains. Of the rock from such great bands as the Dandy Warhols, Super Furry Animals, Primal Scream... and of the passion put over by British actor Kieran O’Brien and American model and sometime film extra, Margo Stilley, from North Carolina. “She really likes the film,” reports the director. “But she’s going back to university and... wants to keep a low profile.”
Franz Ferdinand is the best group and there’s extra music magic in a few minutes of Michael Nyman (during his 60th birthday concert in London). He’s cool about landing up “in the most sexually explicit film in British film history... especially as I am not doing anything sexual.”
Kieran and Margo, however, are at it like rabbits. The action is rapidly predictable. After every rock concert song, yet another sexample of hey, it’s really only fuck ’n’ roll but they like it.
“Part of the point of making the film was to say, What's wrong with showing sex,” says Winterbottom. “In general, you are asking actors to be quite intimate, anyway. From everyday acting to having sex isn’t as big a leap as it might be for someone else.”
Or put it another way: “It's only fucking,” says O’Brien. And Margo added: “It’s normal sex that everyone has. Not crazy stuff.”
Certainly, the sex is more credible than the expensive metaphor of our priapic hero flying over Antarctica, just so he can say that living/working in such icy wastelands is both claustrophobic and agoraphobic. “Like two people in a bed.” Hah!
Whether Winterbottom’s overall experiment of utilising real sex in drama wholly works is a tough call. It’s clearly more successful than Chloe chewing on a brown bunny... the questionable depiction of under-age sex in Larry Clark’s world... or the drabness and grime of Patrice Cherau’s Intimacy (who’d wanna screw even Kerry Fox on the filthy floors of the apartment in that otherwise courageous film).
The problem in getting your actors to really fuck and suck is not the old AICN complaint about “hey, they’re actors and should be acting sex, not doing it for real just as they don’t shoot folk for real.” No, the problem numero uno is how to make sure your real sex doesn’t simply look like real porno. Winterbottom’s achieves this by making it difficult to see any real anything (though that dubious device won cinematographer Marcel Zyskind a prize at the San Sebastian fest).
Well, he’s keeping the faith with his major influence, the grandaddy of all such real sexperiments, Nagisa Oshima’s In The Realm of the Senses (Japan, 1975). #1. The couple is not necessarily humping for real in every sex scene. #2. A proof shot shows when it’s real; when it don’t, it ain’t.
The way Kieran and Margo hug and kiss and jump and shout in the crowds at the Brixton Academy rock concerts is reminiscent of Catherine Wilkening and Stéphane Ferrara in, perhaps, the first of the Euro-movies aiming to make sex as true as possible, José Pinheiro’s Mon bel amour, ma déchirure (France, 1987). Although, I guess, timeline-wise, French journalist-filmmaker Francois Jouffa pulled that off first in La Bonzesse (France, 1975) when persuading the idyllic Sylvie Meyer to fellate some elderly extra for a few seconds. (“Hey, guess what happened to me on the set today!”).
From first encounter to last, O’Brien is rampant and Margo Stilley is deeee-lightful, particularly when giving him a toe-job in the bath tub. (How nostalgic!) And it must be said that she achieves more than being the third American (after Tiffany Limos, Chloe Sevigny) in the increasing roster of feature film fellatrixes (Eiko Matsuda, Carol Laure, Marushka Detmers, Amanda Ooms, Elizabetta Cavallotti, Caroline Ducey, Kerry Fox, etc). Margo also delivers a wholly believable girl - “21, beautiful, egotistical, careless and crazy” - in love with sex, in tune with her body, in charge of her orgasms.
Although looking different in almost every scene, she’s reminiscent, more in spirit than physicality, of a great French ’60s’ babe called Haydée Politoff. Check out her memorable debut, Eric Rohmer’s La Collectioneuse (France, 1967), with dialogue, incidentally, by Haydée and her leading man, Patrick Bachau. (Yes, the Bachau from, The Pretender and Carnivale).
The fact that Winterbottom’s choice of bird is American is a pity. Because it harks back to the shameful ’50s period of British movies when London film-makers doubted British actresses could (or even should) display sexuality and sensuality. This is why Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Elke Sommer and even the then-Mrs. Jean-Luc Godard (Anna Karina) were imported to juice up home-grown product. Simone Signoret won her Oscar that way, playing the adulterous Alice in Room At The Top (1959). In the original novel, Alice was as British as fish ’n’ chips.
What changed that thinking was Swinging London. And the short skirts and long legs of Julie Christie, Vanessa Redgrave, Charlotte Rampling and all the other lovelies right up to today’s amazing Emily Watson, Samantha Morton, Keira Knightley and the first Mrs. Colin Farrell, Amelia Warner (and you can check her out soon enough in Aeon Flux with Charlize Theron and The Wild and Wycked World of Brian Jones).
Sole problem with Winterbottom’s “sensation” is that distributors snap it up while his Code 52 (with that amazing Ms. Morton opposite Tim Robbins) is stuck on a shelf someplace. And that’s sad. Meantime, the guy is already hard at work on Tristam Shandy based on Laurence Sterne's notoriously impossible-to-film novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Line-up includes Steve Coogan from Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People and, yes, Kieran O’Brien. His fly remains zipped as he passes the real sex cause on to others delving into art-core...
There’s more angry inches due from John Cameron Mitchell in Shortbus (aka. The Sex Film Project)... Lukas Moodysson’s A Hole In My Heart is Swedish and Xtremely gynaecological... and Clement Virgo’s Lie With Me (oh ho, again!) is hyped as “the most erotic and intimate film about sex made in North America.” (Didn’t they say that about Wayne Wang’s The Center of World nonsense in 2001? ). A I don’t see The OC’s Eric Balfour and The L Word’s Lauren Lee Smith getting anything on for real, do you?.
Not forgetting Andrea Fraser’s Untitled video in which the artist (that’s Andrea) has sex every which way with her sponsor (that’s an anonymous art collector paying $20,000 for the privilege).
Doubtless these – and others? - are due at Cannes in May and will be hitting Europe – France, at least - a year from now.
Never too late to wish y'all a happy 2005. You can all me Bobby Dupea – ‘cos that’s my name. Today.
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