Peanut Butter Jam and Melancholy Blues: 9 SONGS

9 SONGS theatrical poster

Matt (Kieran O’Brien) is a British geologist who analyses sample bores of ice, deciphering thousands of years of glacial history from their compacted layers. As he does fieldwork in the extreme isolation of Antarctica, he finds himself also examining a single year from his own life, trying to piece together from a few intense memories – nine different gigs which perfectly captured the mood of the moment, and some episodes of sexual intimacy which came in between – what if any significance there was in his relationship (now over, or at least on ice) with visiting American student Lisa (Margo Stilley), and whether he was any less lonely then than he is now on the icy wastes.

9 Songs’ is an experiment in reductive narrative. Its basic storyline – guy meets girl, they have a relationship and then split up – is so familiar from real life as well as from countless films that director Michael Winterbottom can afford to dispense with any peripheral details and get right down to what is most essential in Matt’s memory. Bold as this strategy may be, it is more than a mere exercise in formalism, however briefly, the icy cold of human existence.