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Aug 27, 2008 9:57 PM CST |
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You can condense the plot of Nine Songs, the new film by Michael Winterbottom, into this: a minor rock-and-roll singer meets a girl in the audience, they get together and have sex in between nine songs. When Derek Malcolm, long-time film critic for The Guardian, saw Michael Winterbottom at a festival screening, he went up to him and asked, “Why on earth did you make this film?” Without batting an eyelash, Winterbottom said, “Why not?” Why not indeed? It’s a pleasurable one hour and thirteen minutes, though Stephen Holden (who wrote about the film in The New York Times) went somewhat overboard by calling it “lyrical, graphically explicit chronicle of an ordinary love affair between two attractive people. The movie isn’t the first art film to show real as opposed to simulated sex, but it’s the first to scrutinize at length one couple’s bedroom etiquette in search for their identities.” Ah, that pesky simulated sex! No wonder box office admissions for Hollywood films are down substantially this year. In the meantime, pictures and video of non-simulated sex, especially on the web, is growing. According to a two-year-old statistic, there were 1.3 million porn Web sites, with 32 million unique individuals visiting some 260 million porn Web pages. The two largest individual buyers of bandwidth are two U.S. adult online companies, with sex being the number one researched topic on the internet. Sixty percent of all Web site visits are sexual in nature. There is some major disconnect between the state of popular culture and the libidinous desires of most of the population. Nine Songs happens to be the first “art” film to center on displays of a couple having sex since—well, since Deep Throat became an international phenomenon and crossed the dividing line between licit and illicit. The sex in Nine Songs occupies most of the screen time. In between, there are screen performances by the Dandy Warhols, Franz Ferdinand, Primal Scream, and Super Furry Animals. Lisa, who is a twenty-one-year-old American, meets Matt (Kieran O’Brien) at the rock concert. All of their coupling is photographed in natural light, giving the film a gritty feel. They do cocaine, some pills, Lisa talks of her sexual encounters with other men, and wants to bite Matt’s lip until it bleeds. There is a love scene, of sorts, when Matt falls into an ice-cold sea as he yells that he loves her, and she screams back that she loves him too. There is an abstract metaphor of dreams of Antarctica woven through the narrative. That’s it. The real secret of Nine Songs is this: it’s boring. It puts the audience into the strict relationship of being a voyeur and that’s ultimately an unrewarding position. A more interesting film which also features wall-to-wall graphic sex is Ed Lachman and Larry Clark’s Ken Park. Now two years old, Ken Park has languished in distribution hell. Harmony Korinne, who made Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy, wrote the script. Clark, the director of Kids and Lachman, the accomplished cinematographer of Erin Brockovich and Far From Heaven, joined forces to focus on four teenagers in Visalia, California. There is not much to do—skateboarding and hanging out are about it. So for the four teenagers, graphically-depicted sex, with each other, and with people of their parents’ generation, takes up the central space in the film. But unlike Nine Songs, Ken Park as a film has another agenda: it is a cynical, devastating portrait of how parents relate to kids. The graphic sex here reveals something else—the innocent obedience of a boy as he has sex with his girlfriend’s mother. As intense as these scenes are, as natural as the performances, the filmmakers also have something else in mind. Lachman and Clark are less interested in a storyline as they are in seizing a moment in time, capturing the mood and attitude, a state-of-being. This is a suburban world in which truly desperate housewives and their no-less-desperate husbands reveal the sexual desperation that drives their lives, suffocating all around them. Ken Park is a shock to the system, not for its frontal nudity or uninhibited sex scenes, but for the love that eludes the lost youth as much as it eludes their parents. It’s American Family and Happiness without the bizarre twists. Ken Park reveals the bitter soul of suburban America in a way that’s ultimately poignant and tragic—raw, uninhibited, sad, and beautiful in its emotional emptiness. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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