Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs is a cinematic experiment, and it is just about as successful as such an experiment can be within the context of its self-imposed limitations. Certain criticisms can be made of it, but beyond those the film can either be accepted, dismissed or - more interestingly and appropriately - discussed on its own terms.

Winterbottom and his producer, Andrew Eaton, are the most prolific producers of consistently engaging cinema currently working in UK (and, for that matter, at least in terms of output, most of the Western world). Their projects are all remarkably different from one another - and yet are remarkable too for how they predicate and acknowledge one another. One example of this might be the occasional re-use of certain music from one picture to another - the entirety of the score for 9 Songs was originally written for the 2000 film Wonderland, and In This World and Code 46 shared a cue or two as well. A more overt example would be the development of Winterbottom's style and technique: since 24 Hour Party People in 2002 and In This World the following year, he has been experimenting with the fluidity of digital video - going so far as to shoot the latter project with one camera and as many crew members. Like many filmmakers using DV, his excitement at the freedom the format allows is palpable on screen; and like the most fluent of the early adaptors, that freedom allows for a natural continuation and subtle evolution of style and subject, obvious even when he returned to shooting film for last year's Code 46.

In the case of 9 Songs, the intimacy afforded by digital video, taken in part with the frank sexuality that's been a sub-motif in many of his films (from the naive masochism of Butterfly Kiss to the graphic-yet-nonchalant childbirth scene in Jude), places this film at a natural and logical point in his oveure. And it is indeed simply a point, as opposed to a turning point; it represents no paradigm shift in the development of Winterbottom's aesthetics, and, more generally speaking, while the sexual content of the film may be galvanizing, the film itself is not revolutionary.

That it might be seen as revolutionary by some - and that it is galvanizing - is because the sexual content is front and center and uncensored. The intercourse and oral sex is, as you may have heard, completely real, performed by the lead actors, Kieran O'Brien and Margo Stilley, and not shied away from by the camera (which ever now and then moves ever so slightly just to make sure we can see that penetration is in fact occurring). Furthermore, the sex is practically all there is to the film. It was Winterbottom's intention to chronicle the history of a relationship over the course of a year purely in terms of sexual encounters (interpolated by the titular nine songs, heard - and seen - live in concerts over the course of the year). The characters wake up and have sex, go on vacation and have sex, fight and have sex, make up and have sex - with additional incidental sex in between. Eventually, they break up.

In paring a doomed love affair down to its most primal moments, Winterbottom's chief achievement is an illustration of the basic futility and emotional emptiness of a relationship based purely on sex. This is a de facto result: one cannot truthfully say that these characters' relationship is based purely on sex (although it does start that way), but because all we see is the sex, and because it ends badly, that conclusion is the only one the film allows us to draw.

What is surprising, then, is how unabashedly romantic the film is. One might naturally expect a film that lays bare sexual activity to have an equally stripped down sensibility - a warts-and-all approach, so to speak; a clinical manual on plumbing. Winterbottom takes precisely the opposite approach, and sentimentalizes his graphic material in the same way a Hollywood film might, say, a grand embrace at a train station. It's actually quite manipulative in its sweetness, never so much as when Michael Nyman's bittersweet score (the aforementioned cues from Wonderland) creeps into the soundtrack. This is one of the movie's faults; not that it manipulates, but that it does so redundantly; Nyman's music would have been better served had it only been heard in the sequence during and around which he's actually seen performing (at his 60th Birthday concert), rather than every second or third time an instance of lovemaking occurs.

Perhaps, though, this redundancy is as critic-proof as the film's essential conceit (one can critique the conceit, but not its content, so long as the latter stays true to the former). If this is the case, then the use of that same piece of music - and the sentimentality, romanticism and emotional manipulation, as well as the overridingly masculine point of view of the entire picture - can be excused as an effect of memory. Aside from the mostly inconsequential concert sequences, the film has one other dramatic distraction from all the sex; its bookend sequences set in Antarctica, where Matt, the character played by O'Brien, is either working or traveling. His voice over narration is occupied with thoughts of his old flame, and the arctic landscape serves as a metaphor (at times subtly implied, at others not, but never too overtly) for his feelings and his memory of the feelings. Because the Nyman concert occurred near the end of the relationship, it makes sense that it would be prevalent in his mind; because he did, in fact, probably love the girl, it makes sense that his memories would all be good. The mind has a funny way of working that way. In one scene, Matt asks the girl, whose name is Lisa, if she thinks they'll ever make love without a condom. That he uses the words 'make love' is important, and that he wants to do so unprotected implies a desire for some sort of permanence - which we, via the benefit of objectivity, can already tell is something she's not in the market for.

I wish we could tell more about her. I think the biggest problem with the film, and one that can't be mitigated by concept, is that Stilley simply isn't strong enough an actress to create a character who resonates as a real person. Lisa is an avatar for lustful love. She's frustrating and impenetrable, yes, but there's no mystery or intrigue to her, and thus the only way in which we can identify with Matt's fascination is in our objectification of her. I'm not complaining about the objectification, which ties right back to the conceit of the film, but I am disappointed that Winterbottom wasn't able to do so in a more nuanced manner. I mentioned that the film has a distinctly masculine perspective, and this is both a cause and an effect of that.

The expansive vistas of Antarctica in the opening scenes might suggest that there will be some measure of profundity to be found in the film's minimalist structure; this is not the case. Despite a gradual progression of explicitness, it does eventually become dull and repetitive, in the narrative sense - just as a sex-centric relationship is ultimately unsatisfying, so is a sex-centric narrative; but films like these require consideration of the meta-narrative to be appreciated. By nature of Winterbottom's modus operandi - as a charting of intimacy over a given period of time - 9 Songs is a good film. A few pictures down the road, when one is able to see the retrospective effect it has on his future work, it'll likely be even better.