If we had actually cared about the “characters” played by Margot Stilley and Kieran O’Brien (that is, if they were more than conceits of Michael Naughtybottom’s conceit) the movie might have been worth the $10.75. In contrast, even though Julie Delphy and Ethan Hawke never got naked, Before Sunset was infinitely more engaging because we actually cared about the imaginary personae they had constructed. (That is, when we weren’t gaping at the cinematic chops it took to construct single 16-minute-long shots taken while walking through Parisian streets that played as if they were absolutely spontaneous.) These were people we might like to get to know, to go to dinner with, to drink too much wine with, and perhaps have group sex with. With 9 Songs, though, the condoms never come off, and neither do the emotions.

Moreover, it’s impossible to watch this movie without wanting to strangle Margot Stilley. Her character Lisa (insofar as Lisa is a character instead of a name for O’Brien to call her in front of the camera) will recall every shrill, self-centered, immature, annoying 21-year-old chick you’ve ever met. Really, they should have called this LiveJournal: The Movie.

Thus, for 69 minutes (no joke), we get to thrill to O’Brien fucking Stilley, being abused by Stilley, going to concerts with Stilley, being abused by Stilley, buying Stilley a lap dance, being abused by Stilley, consoling Stilley, who is crying for no discernable reason, being abused by Stilley, seeing Stilley off to America, again for no particular reason (was she finally old enough to drink legally back home? then again, we never knew why she was in London), being abused by Stilley, and then mooning over how good it was to fuck Stilley while he’s off on a research expedition to Antarctica, which we suppose is some sort of metaphor for emotional frigidity. If you want to see a movie about Antarctica, go see March of the Penguins—at least it has hot flightless waterfowl-on-flightless waterfowl action, and penguins are much cuter than Margot Stilley.

Despite the press’s minor feeding frenzy around 9 Songs, sex in major movies is nothing new. Back in 1972, when women were still allowed to have pubic hair, the legendary film critic Pauline Kael enthused in the New Yorker that Last Tango in Paris “may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made” and that “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.”

Of course, they didn’t: Only since the late ‘90s, by which time the Internet had made porn, and porno chic, ubiquitous, and raised the bar for what’s considered “entertainment” (remember when Sharon Stone’s snatch was shocking?) have “legitimate films” started including real sex again—Caroline Ducey in Romance (which doesn’t count since it’s art, French, and made by a woman), Kerry Fox in Intimacy (which doesn’t count since it’s “acting”), Chloë Sevigny with her real-ex-life boyfriend Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny (which doesn’t count since it was shot in such a way that makes it more like their personal home video edited into his masturbatory art-house flick), Tiffany Limos in near-pedophile Larry Clark’s Ken Park (which doesn’t count since she’s a desperate non-Aryan starlet with nothing to lose and he’s a perv). Even America’s sweetheart Meg Ryan got into the act with In the Cut (which doesn’t count since she wasn’t the blower and the brief scene was, uh, cut anyway).

All that 9 Songs improves on all these movies is that it somehow crosses the boundary from “mere” oral sex to penis-in-vagina thrusting. Linda Lovelace would have been pleased that she had made the blowjob so humdrum. (Some of you may be wondering why I didn’t mention Baise-Moi. Answer: It’s French and was shot with porn actresses. 9 Songs is "no sex, please we're" British; thus the scandal. Alcohol is about the only thing that's allowed the UK to repoduce its population since the Middle Ages.)

Save for Sevigny and Fox, all the actresses from Maria Schneider in Tango onwards have been unknowns (and French)—presumably hungry, in their own insatiable insecure ways, for anything to jump-start their careers. And, though we won't presume to plumb the depths of what's politely referred to as Sevigny's mind, regarding Intimacy, Kerry Fox’s boyfriend wrote an elaborate explanation in the Guardian of his emotions watching his partner blowing another man in the name of “art.” (And no, he didn’t start defending swinging or polyamory, which I might have respected.) Me, if my actress girlfriend came home and said, “I want to put another man’s genitalia in my mouth while some other guys with cameras tell me what to do,” I would have said, “Fine. You go do that, and I’ll find someone to go out whose life’s work doesn’t involve being a poseur.”

What’s with this sudden prudery? Isn’t this site called “Corporate Motherfucker”? To be sure, we’re all for sex: sex in private, sex in public, sex at sex parties, sex with your swinger’s club, sex with friends and friends of friends, sex with your right hand, sex with your neighbor’s wife while he watches from the closet and jerks off, sex with any other consenting human beings who take your fancy. However, being hired to have sex with someone as part of a job takes depersonalization to a whole new level. It also raises some disturbing questions.

We all know porn stars or Skinemax B-actresses are just playing a role (and rather cartoonishly at that), but what about these “real” people making the movie? Are the actors really into each other? Did they have sex off-camera, too? Or are they just acting? How do they feel about it? Why are they doing this at all—some deep-seated need for approval? Knowing that they were capable of fucking someone and acting as if they liked it, if I were to meet them in real life, say for tea, how would I know anything they said was true? Are they really laughing at my jokes, are they faking it because they want me to write a good review of their movie?

Moreover, what does such a movie say about its audience in a world where everyone follows Brad and Jen and Angelina like they grew up together in Ozone Park and home movies of celebrities and quasi-celebrities having sex with their significant others are regularly “stolen” and leaked on the Internet in the hopes of gaining the limelight for a few brief seconds? What are the rest of us expected to do? Is this what sex looks like? Should I act like that? Should I expect my girlfriend or boyfriend to make those faces? How can I know if they’re really enjoying themselves, or if they just don’t want to hurt my feelings? Why are they with me in the first place? Where does the fake stop and the real begin? What does sex mean any more? Are we all whores?

Well, we may not all be whores, but in a sense actors are, and having actual sex on camera is just the next step in our jaded society's inevitable progression from chaste kissing under the Hayes Code, then Annette Funicello and wearing a bikini instead of a one-piece to Russ Meyer toEuropean “art” films. Bare boobies became OK, then kissing boobies became ok, male frontal nudity was pioneered by Merchant Ivory (and before that by A Woman in Love). Then came the questions like, “are they really doing it?” in scenes when the actors were off-camera lovers (or pretended to be for their careers’ sake).

The question is why Michael Winterbottom and company took things to their logical concusion in 9 Songs with no plot and virtually no context. Really, it would have been a much better movie if Winterbottom had provided us with the illusion of actual people fucking on-screen.