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XVI: 9 Songs (Michael Winterbottom, 2004)
Apr. 23rd, 2012 10:27 pm
What is now an annual rewatch of filth - I can do this twice more - with Winterbottom's attempt to shock, although what dates it is the fact that the two main characters smoke at concerts, though not for Michael Nyman. Matt is a climatologist, about to go to Antarctica, Lisa is an American student, working on PhD. They go to concerts, they talk and hang out, they have graphic but poorly lit sex. Then she leaves, and Matt has gone to the Antarctic, presumably in search of a metaphor Winterbottom would claim he didn't want as he wished to afford the artistic defense in showing sexual materials.
If it had the courage of its convictions, it would be He and She, and we'd know less about them, and in fact they would go to concerts and hang out and have graphic sex but not talk. Some years when I show this to students they are very critial about She, and note how boyish she is, and note how annoying they find her (and I suspect they are right). Sometimes they want to slap her... This year they were less boisterous, and it's perhaps salutary that this is a film I like more than when I first saw it.
If it had the courage of its convictions, it would be He and She, and we'd know less about them, and in fact they would go to concerts and hang out and have graphic sex but not talk. Some years when I show this to students they are very critial about She, and note how boyish she is, and note how annoying they find her (and I suspect they are right). Sometimes they want to slap her... This year they were less boisterous, and it's perhaps salutary that this is a film I like more than when I first saw it.
