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'9 Songs' takes risks, but it doesn't sing

When chemists conduct experiments that go horribly wrong, they can usually buy some new test tubes and move on, learning from the process without sharing the failure with the world. But when a filmmaker experiments, financiers and cast members tend to expect the result to play in theaters, no matter how unsuccessful it was artistically.

Tartan Films USA '9 Songs' 1 out of 5 stars Director: Michael Winterbottom Starring: Kieran O'Brien, Margot Stilley Run time: 69 minutes Release date: July 22, 2005 Rating: Not rated, but includes explicit sex scenes. On the web Official movie site [an error occurred while processing this directive]

So it is that "9 Songs," a movie that exists solely to test the dramatic possibilities for explicit depiction of real sex, is opening in a theater near you. It's an aesthetic failure, although one can imagine the raincoat crowd making it a financial success.

Moviegoers hoping for some cheap titillation are missing the point, though. The film is as graphic as pornography, but unlike porn, "9 Songs" isn't trying to be a stand-in for human intercourse; it wants to arouse viewers, not provide a shortcut to satisfaction.

English writer/director Michael Winterbottom made excellent films before "9 Songs" — "24 Hour Party People," for one — and probably will again. (Considering his prolificacy — a new effort will be at this month's Toronto Film Festival — he might have redeemed himself already.) But "9 Songs" offers at most a few memorable moments in search of a reason to exist.

The title refers to the number of concerts that form the romance of a young couple, Matt and Lisa (Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley). In what quickly becomes a tiresome structure, Winterbottom provides a crowd's-eye view of a rock band performing a song from start to finish, then hops back to Matt's apartment for snippets of the kind of mundane intimacy that most movies would sculpt into something more conventionally entertaining. Back and forth we go, with occasional flashes forward to the Antarctic, where Matt is on an expedition and trying unsuccessfully to forget Lisa.

Viewers aren't likely to have the same trouble forgetting her, or the movie itself. The concert footage is unexciting, the sex tells us nothing about the characters, and the detours across glaciers look suspiciously like a tacked-on frame — an attempt to give metaphoric meaning to a movie that never quite gelled.