Tuesday, May 14, 2013
"9 Songs": A scientist from Antarctica plays hard back at home in London
The film “9 Songs”, which has some solitary awesome shots of
young glaciologist Matt (Kiieran O’Brien) alone on the Antarctic polar cap, and
it mentions that the glaciers are receding. This little film was shot about a
year before Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”.
The rest of the film, however, would seem to justify the
late Roger Ebert’s claim that NC-17 should be a legitimate rating for mature
films for adults. Technically, the film
(by Michael Winterbottom) is not rated.
The story of his relationship with college student Lisa (Margo Stilley)
is told quite explicitly, even with a little bit of SM. The third layer of the film is the projection
of all this (into nine specific musical numbers) into rock band music, from the
Vlack Rebel Motorcycle Cliub, Von Bondies, Elbow, Primal Scream, The Dandy Warhols,
Super Furry Animals, Franz Ferdinand, and Michael Nyman.
Physically, Matt seems to come out of all of this amazingly
unscathed physically. Wouldn’t he get
frostbite in the Antarctic? It hasn’t
warmed that much. Winterbottom says he
researched the living conditions of scientists in close-quarter tents or Quonsets
before making the film. (Sound familiar?
No privacy?)
The intimate scenes, as shown, though, are accompanied
usually by modern classical piano music, usually Bartok or Satie.
The movie (from Revolution Films, Palisades Pictures and
Tartan) still has a site in France, link.
The director says that many actors would not be OK with
telling a story in this manner. Actors
often don’t know what will be expected in a “legitimate porn” film like this. He also says that the nine songs were chosen
from among 150.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment