“9 Songs” is a pointless, half-baked, and singularly unattractive film about two boring people having sex and attending rock concerts. It was probably dreamed up at a pub over a few pints, and there it should have remained. Winterbottom is far too talented to waste his time on a quotidian sex fantasy soured with the aroma of phony, cinema-wank neorealism.

The justification for “9 Songs” seems to have been a quest for putting the unvarnished truth on the big screen. Godard called cinema truth at twenty-four frames per second, but of course that was a self-consciously problematic declaration. Godard grasped that film necessarily distorts any subject it captures. He made a career out of exploring those distortions, which is why a lark like “A Woman Is A Woman”, for all its mercurial strangeness, brings us closer to the truth than most “realistic” movies.

Judging by his film, Winterbottom seems to think a truthful movie means squeezing the fun out of everything. Because real life is, you know, boring. Slow, poorly lit, unmagical, shabby. And while that’s sometimes the case, and “9 Songs” occasionally gets this right, in the end it’s no more “truthful” than any other conventional relationship flick. Worse, because of the way it attempts to underscore its reality by making everything in the bedroom joyless, po-faced, and mechanical—a Puritanical treatment of the subject, incidentally—it’s only a fraction as sexy.