The Unseen Movie Review

9 Songs

All you need to know is that this is the film which caused a major ruckus last year when it emerged that its respected British director, Michael Winterbottom (of Welcome to Sarajevo, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People fame), had got his lead actors, the experienced Kieran O’Brien and newcomer Margot Stilley, to have real, explicit, penetrative sex on camera. Absolutely nothing left to the imagination. Absolutely nothing faked.

Yes, this is basically porn – but porn presented in a manner which allows various pseudo-intellectuals the room to blather unconvincingly about how it’s not porn, it’s art. Because – hey – it’s all a flashback as the guy reminisces about his relationship, yeah? And all he seems to be able to remember is, like, the music gigs he went to and the sex, yeah? Because, like, that’s like where his head was at the time, yeah? It’s, like, confronting us with harsh truths about the superficiality and egocentricity of the inner workings of the male psyche, yeah?

Abject nonsense – it’s porn, plain and simple. And it doesn’t even have the benefit of being good porn. If you’re watching it in the hope of titillation, unless you’re fourteen you’ll be sorely disappointed. And if you’re fourteen, you shouldn’t be watching it anyway – it’s got a well-deserved 18 certificate.

The only argument going for the “it’s art” brigade is that it is almost entirely unerotic and devoid of and genuine sense of sensuality. But much good art is incredibly sensual and erotic – without the need to pay a woman to take her clothes off and perform various rather tedious-seeming sexual acts. Quite what Winterbottom was trying to achieve – beyond getting to see an attractive young woman naked and demeaned and earning himself a reputation for being a dirty old man – is impossible to work out.

It is also entirely without any kind of plot. The film is basically just sex scene, music, sex scene, music throughout its entire length. No character progression, no revelations, no surprises, no interest.

The only redeeming feature, beyond the fact that at 69 minutes it is mercifully shot, is the music - intercut with the sex as excerpts from the gigs the couple apparently went to at London’s Brixton Academy. The hip and trendy likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Von Bondies, Super Fury Animals, Dandy Warhols, Franz Ferdinand and Primal Scream fill out the few parts of the film that don’t involve banal intercourse and brief snippets of entirely unenlightening and uninspired dialogue.

In other words, the soundtrack could be worth picking up, but that’s about the only thing going for this turgid mess of a cheap and unimaginative skin flick. In fact, it may almost be worth showing to fourteen year olds, if only to show them that sex isn’t necessarily all its cracked up to be and can be just as tediously boring as any maths lesson.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM