E-Mail This Article to a Friend Hard rock 9 Songs needs back-up; Junebug buzzes along BY GERALD PEARY

My wife called 9 Songs "not completely untitillating," which, though dead-on accurate, isn’t exactly a peter-meter boner for the most hardcore film ever from an above-board non-X filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom, the respected British director of Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People, and In This World, cast his Kama Sutra coupling with nice-looking people (Kieran O’Brien, Margo Stilley), and they have no inhibition about going to town, up and downtown, orally and manually, in imaginatively kinky ways.

So why isn’t all this a celebratory turn-on, especially since the copulations are splendidly lit and shot? There’s something psychologically unnerving about Winterbottom’s cross-genre melding of art and prurience. Mind and eye and body are jerked about. I’m not sure why, but the more prettified and professional the filming, the more uncomfortable it is to watch raw fornication, a dildo crammed in a pussy, sperm oozing out of a hard cock. Maybe the Puritans were right: sex is squalid and filthy and should be banished from mainstream cinema.

But the unpardonable sin of 9 Songs is that there’s no friggin’ story! We know nothing about Matt and Lisa except that they like clubbing, fucking, and sucking. I mean, who doesn’t? (Well, clubbing can get awfully old.) Those aren’t bios. There’s not a doubt that the same sex scenes would register 10 times as lusty performed by a twosome with out-of-the-sheets identities. Between bedroom trysts, Matt and Lisa clean their palates watching various headliners at London’s Brixton Academy. There’s some good music, but Winterbottom’s videoing is frustratingly amateur; mostly he’s zooming in from the back of the club. Of the bands, the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club are a knockout, and Michael Nyman plays mellow piano celebrating his 60th birthday.

You might think it was a coup for the Provincetown Film Festival when programmer Connie White snared the 2005 Sundance Special Jury Award winner, Junebug, back in June. But not according to filmmaker Phil Morrison, who at P-Town indicated that the honor was all his. "When this movie was at Sundance, there was a lot to be nervous about. Like, would Connie White like it? I guess she did, and invited us, or else she’s just being nice."

In the film (now playing at the Kendall Square and the Embassy), a gallery owner specializing in outsider art visits a North Carolina man with lots of weird, post–Howard Finster paintings. Where did these come from? Morrison: "Ann Wood, a painter in Brooklyn, made them for the movie. Some works were described in the script, but it’s difficult, this studied naïveté for what were essentially props. Ann, who was very mild-mannered, would arrive on the set with a painting of a slave with a slave owner impaled on his penis. Okay, Ann!"

The Winston-Salem native was asked whether his picture, which features many contemplative, almost still shots, was inspired by other movies from below the Mason-Dixon line. "A lot of films I’ve seen from Iran or from Ozu reminded me more of where I grew up than the films of the South. We shot for 20 days. I spent a lot of time staring into space: that felt very still!"

To me, this film is almost Chekhovian, with its characters arriving and departing from the countryside, and with everyone staying much the same at the end. I told Morrison of my aversion to films in which characters change overnight after "learning something." "There was stuff we shot that was more like movies you hate," he admitted. "In the edit, we realized we could make the story with less of these changes, and it felt right. But I’d like to think that down the road, because of what happened, things might change."

Written by playwright Angus MacLachlan, Junebug is Morrison’s first feature film. "I went to NYU film school a long time ago, 1987, and then made a short, "Tater Tomater," written by Angus. I made a lot of rock videos, TV commercials, comedy stuff, but I didn’t feel I had to make a movie until the time was right, which was last summer."