“When I remember Lisa, I don’t think about her clothes or her work or where she was from or even what she said. I think about her smell, her taste, her skin touching mine.”

And so it goes for the 69 minute duration of Michael Winterbottom’s latest film. A couple meet at a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club gig at Brixton Academy. Over the course of the next year they fuck and go to gigs. We learn nothing about either of them, aside from the fact that he works in the Antarctic, which we discover through intermittent clips of him flying over the snowy wilderness, reciting statistics and information about the Antarctic and sounding very like a BBC nature presenter. As with his memories, the viewer doesn’t think about Lisa’s clothes, as she is rarely wearing any, or her work (because aside from saying once she has a meeting to go to, it is never mentioned what she does.) We know she is American from her accent and the fact she is able to show him how they dance at raves in the States. We don’t think about what she says as she says practically nothing and when she does open her mouth, her dialogue is generally banal.

Or am I being unfair? There surely must be more to it than that. Let’s think again.

Matt and Lisa meet at the aforementioned Black Rebel Motorcycle gig, go back to his place, fuck and wake up together. He flies over the Antarctic in a plane. They go to a Von Bondies gig together. Next morning she seduces him when he’s making breakfast. They fuck again. After, as they caress at the window, the morning light breaks into the room and a beam of sun plays off her shoulder blades. They snort coke together, she dances around the room then they have anal sex. After, he asks her, ‘Do you think we’ll ever make love without using a condom?’ She tells him no, she prefers it the way it is. Then they’re off to an Elbow gig which they snog all the way through. Next they’re away for a weekend in a cottage by the seaside. They play word association games on the way there. He stops the car in the rain and she tells him nationalities of all the men she’s slept with. Back home, they’re off to a Primal Scream concert with an all too short clip of the band performing ‘Moving on Up.’ It’s always good to see Bobby Gillespie do his thang, but sadly, Matt is soon back in his plane, telling us “the Antarctic is the planet’s memory.” Back home without landing, Lisa reads him erotica in bed, he blindfolds and ties her to the bed and tells her to imagine she’s on a beach in Thailand with people watching her pleasure herself. She takes the fantasy over as he goes down on her. Her face upside down on the screen looks strangely bizarre and puts one in mind of these adverts with the singing chins some years back. Undeterred, he gets the condom on again. Another gig – the Dandy Warhols this time I think, though couldn’t swear. He cooks her dinner and suggests they do something together for Thanksgiving. She’s already made plans with friends she said he wouldn’t like. A clanking feeling that she may be going off the boil is affirmed when she tells him, ‘Sometimes when you kiss me I just want to bite you, and not in a good way,’ then they go to a lapdancing bar, it’s her ends up getting the lapdance and he storms off in a huff. Deprived of nookie for a couple of minutes, she’s soon pleasuring herself with her vibrator, appearing to have a good deal more fun with it than she does with him. Again, this is confirmed when in the next scene they’re in bed, she’s crying and he’s comforting her. Luckily he goes off to make dinner so she cranks it on again, this time letting him watch her, looking suitably unimpressed, before going back to his cooking. What’s worse, he has to go and see the Super Furry Animals on his own as she’s tired herself out with self-love. ‘5000 people in a room and you can still feel alone,’ he ruminates as he mopes at the gig. Things start to really go downhill after he accidentally puts sugar in her tea. She plays with a bottle of pills and looks distressed. He accuses her of popping pills in the afternoon. She throws a strop and tells him he’s boring. Later, she ties him to the bed and tries to redress the power balance via a pair of stiletto boots. It seems like she’s succeeded when we get the first smile out of her for about 20 minutes and he gets a blow-job into the bargain. So the viewers don’t feel left out, they get a fantastic clip of Franz Ferdinand live – “so much better on holiday, that’s why we only work when we need the money.” Aha, work! In case you’d forgotten that either of them had time for such a thing, between all the fucking and gigs and tantrums, she buys him a book on the Antarctic for his birthday and reads it to him, possibly to remind him what he does for a living. They snort some more coke then go to see Michael Nyman’s 60th birthday concert. Afterwards, she tells him she’s going back to America. He’s not happy. She tells him, ‘You have to have faith in people.’ I imagine they probably fucked at this point but by this time the sex scenes were serving to anaesthetise me and I was starting to drop off every time she spread her legs. Her last week before returning home they do the sights of London together and decorate a Christmas tree. The day she leaves is the first time she lets him visit her flat, but we only see them leaving it. One assumes they had a farewell fuck, although perhaps by this point the director, camera and sound crew (the only people allowed on set during the filming of the sex scenes apart from the actors) were so bored themselves, they couldn’t face another one. They’d done penetration, cunnilingus, blow jobs, ejaculation, anal, bondage, intercrural foot sex in the bath and wanted to get home for their tea. She goes off to the airport alone to avoid a long goodbye (she’s heard about the security delays at Heathrow and doesn’t want to be stuck there for 3 hours struggling to make conversation with a man who she’d only ever fucked or stood in very loud rooms where they couldn’t hear each other anyway.) Then we’re full circle back to a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club gig and it’s the end.

Is it sex and drug and rock n’ roll pared to the bone? Or is it basically just a rather dull film about a man who works in the Antarctic, looking back on a brief love affair he’s had, particularly the physical side and the gigs they went to together? Do we not hear about Lisa’s life outwith the relationship because she hides it from him, or because he doesn’t think about it? When we look back on relationships these things don’t matter. We just think about the best sex we had, and the few memorable moments when we weren’t having sex. Does the film convey this well? I have to say yes. Just sadly, that isn’t too interesting. Especially when Matt and Lisa seem a particularly dour pair of buggers. Did they never make each other laugh?

The Antarctic scenes also seem to take the viewer out of the film too much, to the point they seem almost tacked on. It’s hard enough running between the bedroom, the Brixton Academy, the seaside cottage, Hackney Empire and the London Eye without keeping being hurtled off to the most remote place on earth. Yes, it looks beautiful, but it just seems sometimes like out-takes from a forthcoming/previous Winterbottom/O’Brien project.

Respect does have to go to the leads, Keiran O’Brien and Margo Stilley for playing the roles sensitively in the face of the inevitable hard press the film was bound to receive. O’Brien, an actor of 20 years, took the role in his stride and grabbed the opportunity to work with Winterbottom again (‘24 Hour Party People’, ‘Cracker’) but Stilley, in one of her first starring roles, has tended to avoid the press since, leading to suggestions that she now regrets her part in the film. Time will tell whether this is justified. The sex scenes, though the most explicit yet seen in a British film, are not titillating and do manage to express aspects of the relationship between the characters.

One also has to applaud Winterbottom’s pushing at the barriers in a time where UK and US audience’s repression mean they just don’t go to see films with sexual content these days, let alone of an explicit/naturalistic kind like this. But Winterbottom has always played to a more European market and thrives on experimentation, win or lose, from the split screen format of ‘Code 46’ to ‘In this World.’ It’s appropriate that his next project, with O’Brien again, is ‘Tristan Shandy.’ I’ll maybe reserve my judgement till then.

Laura Hird is the Orange and Whitbread nominated author of the collection, ‘Nail and Other Stories’ and novel, ‘Born Free.’ Her short stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies internationally. Her new collection of short stories is due to be published by Canongate Books in May 2005. She runs and edits her own loosely arts-related website on which she seeks out and publishes new poetry, short stories, reviews, interviews etc. She was born and lives in Edinburgh.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.