A Midwestern friend reviews porno videos at twenty-five dollars a pop, a supplement to his wife’s teaching salary. His ironic humor finds such fare honest in that no one is spectacularly dispatched by special effects, though things get pretty unimaginatively repetitious. More mainstream, Andy Warhol inherited boring underground sex from Kenneth Anger and became “important,” wrote New York Film Festival co-founder Richard Roud, in that he “pushed back the boundaries of boredom.”

Pop-artist Warhol barely scripted for his factory superstars who, in a loose semi-documentary way, played themselves for his non-judgmental camera. In works like Sleep, where in real time of six to eight hours depending on the version, the screen shows a man doing just that, or ****/Four Stars/24-Hour Movie, non-technique either tested audience endurance, explored cinematic space-time, showed up the non-selective routine of people’s lives, or simply generated fame and money for its auteur.

Whatever one thinks about that Pittsburgh painter of soup cans and pop icons before Paul Morrissey took over to produce more structured, marketable films, he at least had sense enough to keep quiet and certainly not try to relate the work to high culture Proustian flashbacks triggered by physical experience. Not so Michael Winterbottom, whose 9 Songs encompasses “the planet’s memory,” “concert of memory,” “intimate memory.”

Though they mention “work,” and even telephone in, neither of the two sole characters is tied to a concrete outside world, despite a silly frame of Matt (Kieran O’Brien) as a glaciologist flying, then snowshoeing, over the South Polar continent and noting that cylindrical corings of compacted snow and ice record the Earth’s history-memory. In between, in what must be his personal remembering, is the affaire with Lisa (Margo Stilley), an American in London with no past beyond a brief catalogue of exotic lovers beginning in high school.

In this experiment, “not shot chronologically” and with “no plan,” whose “idea . . . was to get rid of story [and] structure,” the two meet at Brixton Academy music hall, at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club rock concert, are turned on, and soon in his bed. And so it goes: interspersed with other real concerts, at various venues and all in standard handheld rocumentary -- probing spotlights and primary colors, seas of waving hands, high grain, high volume -- they explore each other to contrastingly subdued piano nocturnes and he (not she) occasionally performs housewifely chores.

The director “utterly indifferent to actual pornography,” composer-pianist Michael Nyman “pleased to be in the most sexually explicit film in British film history,” the audience remains uncomfortably indifferent. In what Winterbottom somehow concludes is this “concert movie,” Matt and Lisa try everything from tying each other to bedposts to a voyeuristic semi-threesome at the Venus Club -- with numerous other sexual activities, locations and appliances in between. The actors have a jolly old time of it in this sex with no intimacy. The camera shies at nothing and leaves in the dust The Brown Bunny’s controversial ten seconds of glory in the flower. Matt turns another year older and desires something more solid, long-term, spiritual, and perhaps committed . . . and Lisa abruptly announces that she’s moving back home, across the Atlantic.

Hardly the would-be anonymous and impersonal entanglement envisioned by Brando’s complex Paul in Last Tango in Paris, 9 Songs is a mere wannabe slice of something-or-other. Lisa’s remark that her guy is “so boor-RING today” is true even though it ought to be applied to both guilty parties. Leaving less than little to imagination -- in Bull Durham skivvies, Annie and Crash are infinitely more erotic -- and inducing no curiosity about the characters such as Bertolucci pulled off about Paul and his dead wife, Winterbottom serves up Swinburne’s “sexless orgies,” passion without a trace of passion. Any specious pretensions to serious purpose went down the drain even before the projector whirred, in cynical publicity information that running time is sixty-nine minutes. 

(Released by Tartan USA; not rated by MPAA.)