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I WISH I
were Mae West when I get confronted by a film like 9
Songs. I could have just muttered the lines: I used
to be Snow White but I drifted. But there is only one
Mae West and there are very few films like 9 Songs,
and even fewer filmmakers like Michael Winterbottom. For
one, Winterbottom is a filmmaker with a laureled past: a
sprinkling of Bafta wins and nominations, a Silver Bear
from the Berlin Film Festival for his The Road to
Guantánamo. The guy has earned a reputation for
being serious, for being political—or both. Now this
film called 9 Songs.
The film
is about two people and their love affair. Matt (Kieran
O’Brien) is a British scientist who studies Antartica.
His discipline of climatology is the reason for the
scenes with the ice, but the narration about human
groups and the Ice Age baffles. The scenes with the
glacier are beautiful. They also initiate the feeling
that the scenes are disjointed
Matt
recalls his love affair with an American exchange
student Lisa (Margo Stilley). The recollection is vivid
and the memories of the sex they had are graphic. If sex
scenes are deemed erotica, it is because they fulfill
the meaning of the word, that of arousing sexual desire.
Now, even if Freud has been quoted as saying that
sometimes cigar is just cigar, in Winterbottom’s film
cigar is cigar. And genitalias are genitalias.
They are
fondled and exposed. They are shot up close and the
scenes linger for details. The act is real and not
simulated because the director himself has been quoted
as saying that cinema has been conservative and prudish.
With that artistic decision, the film carries scenes of
oral sex, bondage and even male ejaculation. In between
are songs like Elbow’s “Fallen Angel,” Black Motorcycle
Club’s “Love Burns”... all nine of them. We never count,
though, because we await the in-betweens.
I bring
these things up because as I write this, people are
engaged in a debate about the merits—and the morals—of
Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. The British film 9
Songs also swam the waters of public compunction and
survived the flood of reactions, indignations and shock.
The film
was an official entry to Toronto and Sundance. In the
San Sebastian Film Festival, it received a Jury award.
What is more intriguing—and enlightening—is that the
film was bandied as the most sexually explicit film in
British cinema. So, you see, a porno film can never be
“the most sexually explicit”; nor can it be “explicit”
for it does not belong anymore to the act of exposure.
If, by this standard, porn cannot be explicit about sex,
what can they be? Dirty about sex? Distorted about sex?
Don’t judge now. The clear lesson we learn from this
film is that cultures and industries can make categories
anytime, and each time we push the boundaries and
advance the frontiers. By sunset, policies are enacted
and the greater population is assuaged.
The case
of 9 Songs is landmark. The British Board of Film
Classification gave it an 18. Before 9 Songs,
18-certificated films were not allowed to depict actual
sex acts. In another generation, under another
cultural/intellectual atmosphere, the film could have
been given R18, which means that the film could be
purchased only from sex shops.
But sex
films are really Rorschach blots: they tell us more
about ourselves and how we regard sex than how the
director appropriates the most human act, as a metaphor
for the persistence of memory or sexuality.
Of great
material
A
DIFFERENT form of sensuality shrouds people in Andrucha
Waddington’s The House of Sand (Casa de Areia).
The Brazilian film opens with an eternity of white and
gray and black, the surplus of nature in the form of
sand and desert. It is a beautiful expanse but
frightening because it is not created for people to
live.
If there
is someone in that place, he must be insane. There is,
and he is leading the band of men and two women trying
to find a place to settle. The man, almost too old to be
the husband of the pregnant young woman, sees the watery
surface and tells everyone it is the place given to him
by the government.
Men
leave and women are left behind. Set in the desert or in
this interminably wide swath of sand and sand, men
follow what they are destined to do: to explore and to
know and to leave the knowledge about the cycle of life
to women.
Aurea
Torres, pregnant, is soon left alone with her mother,
Maria. The other men have fled after seeing fugitive
slaves who have settled much ahead of them. Vasco, the
demented explorer, later dies.
Aurea
and Maria discover that there is an island. They get
there and come upon people who do not dream of leaving
the place. The mother and daughter plot their departure.
Their plan is simple: to get to where there is a road.
But there is no road, and the island is really a sand
dune. They build a house on sand upon sand. In their
place, only the sands shift. Time stands still and even
seem to go backward.
Soon
they grow old. The mother decides to be with one of the
slaves. One day Aurea comes upon a group of scientists
out to observe the eclipse and meets Luis, the guide of
the scientists. He promises to take her out of that
isolated place. Aurea returns to her home and finds that
the sand has once more moved and buried her home. She
looks for her mother and her children.
Soon,
Aurea becomes her mother and she, her daughter. Fernanda
Torres, who plays Aurea, is now played by Fernanda
Montenegro, who plays Maria. Then Fernanda Torres plays
her daughter.
Appearances become apparitions, and apparitions are
transformed into wish-fulfilling symbols about how we
are as dreamers. As Aurea, the woman seeking for that
place, Fernanda Torres is all sexual but not explicit.
Fernanda Montenegro (Central Station) plays
Maria, the mother, and Aurea, the daughter, grown old,
as if she knows that sex and time and eternity and
acceptance are all explicit truths about people.
Contemplation about time and aging is surreal but
truthful in House of Sand because the filmmaker has
opted to allow the surrounding to be infinitely bigger
than human beings, as they truly are. The world of Aurea
and Maria is both prison and paradise, and when Aurea
(Montenegro in a glamorous hippie fashion), now as old
as her mother, comes to visit her mother Maria
(Montenegro made up to be ancient), we see the charm and
the healing power of time. It closes the wounds of the
people who have been tricked by time. It charms people
to accept that even if man has gone to the moon, they
can still believe in our old tales about eternity and
stars and planets. These are ponderous things but the
film at the end has Montenegro, and Montenegro casting
her own spell upon us and we feel light and enchanted
and restored.
The
House of Sand
is written by Elena Soarez. It won the Alfred P. Sloan
Prize at the 2006 Sundance. |
