(Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, 9 Songs)
I must admit that, walking into Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, I knew little about the largest corporate bankruptcy in history (and in turn, the largest corporate crime), and that the only reason I was drawn to it was because I smelt another one of those classic trainwreck tales with an irrestistible built-in gawk-factor.

As it turns out, Enron’s jaw-dropping crash-and-burn has all the ingredients of a good tragedy (as insensitively oxymoronic as that might sound) – greed, power, scandal, flawed characters – that’ll grip and fascinate even numbers-phobic dummies like myself who won’t understand a single equation of its stock-trading mechanisms. The best thing: the inclusion of The Simpsons parody, a masterstroke of economical satire which shrewdly condenses the entire rise-and-fall arc of the doco into a rollercoaster ride that lasts several seconds.

Despite its polarizing, brazenly uncommercial experimentalism and the controversy surrounding the explicit hardcore performances of the actors, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs is actually a lot more gooily romantic than one might expect. The, er, naked plot is – to quote one of the characters describing the topographic make-up of the Antarctic – “an exercise in reductionism”. It consists mainly of two types of scenes: the bedroom trysts between Brit Kieran O’Brien and American Margo Stilley (whose decision to launch into her acting career with this film is a commendably ballsy move if anything) and their visits to the Brixton Academy to check out Britain’s indie-rock-stalwarts-of-the-moment. It’s indulgently improvisitional, which means sitting through some dead space, and shots that linger on for a beat too long, but the film nevertheless taps into the drug-taking, sexually frank hedonism of youthful contemporary relationships with a considerable degree of authenticity.

More intriguing is the film’s lyrical, dreamy quality that evokes ‘60s-‘70s European cinema: the grubby DV-to-film visuals produce a palette that strangely resemble nostalgic super 8 footage, while Michael Nyman’s beautiful, melancholic keys gently plonking in the background is the perfect soundtrack for tearful pining. 9 Songs kept summoning up thoughts of Alain Resnais’ work. Maybe because it’s most satisfying as an impressionistic collage, a memory capsule containing the scattered, lovingly remembered fragments of a couple’s private universe.—AY