(9 Songs, Palindromes)
Censors have inadvertently become involved in a kind of audience baiting over their childish attempts at outlawing anything that springs more flesh than their pants can handle. Leaving 9 Songs was like being greeted by a bunch of nine-year old boys who had just discovered that their dad’s porn cabinet was actually filled with bundles of Cleo (if I was a betting man, Anatomy of Hell still holds the crown, following its incongruously creative use of gardening tools and fresh-off-the-operating-table gynecological footage).

Almost as brisk as the act itself, 9 Songs employs the barren Antarctic landscape – an etched memory of its own existence – as a springboard for its fusion of hardcore fucking and grainy concert footage, the latter functioning as a kind of chapter stop intended to relieve us from the almost endless cycle of flesh-on-flesh. Just about ready to dismiss the film on the grounds that sex has only *so* much dramatic capacity – particularly when it lacks the provocative gender-play of Breillat –, a friend forced reevaluation by suggesting that the film floats a kind of in-built ennui, one that the characters aren’t really aware of: reflecting on his relationship with Lisa, all Matt can come up with is a delayed yawn of activity – so that, in the end, sometimes these things become more about what you do together, rather than actually getting anywhere. Winterbottom begs to differ, claiming that he sought “[s]omething of the atmosphere of being in love, without really sort of seeing much beyond that,” though once it’s out of the director’s hands, who’s to say... ?

Sometimes, reliability is a blessing, and I’m glad to see that Solondz is still a raging misanthrope. Happiness was a masterpiece because it was able to translate his fits of self-laceration into a fully-fledged community of feeling; it uncomfortably wallowed in its own disgust. Unfortunately, Palindromes amps up the bile and sheds the self-awareness, content to harpoon both camps of the abortion issue from the security of its lounger. Proving that grossing people out is a matter based as much on conception as visualization (take that, Winterbottom), Solondz dumps thirteen-year old Aviva in a harem of pedophilia, aborted fetuses and casual sadism. The gag here is that the stasis-within-mutability of her name – “the same whether you spell it backwards or forwards” – extends to her identity as well, with the various permutations coming to play her coasting the same basic melody of teen body-anxiety, etc. Once a fuck-up, always a fuck-up, is the adage uttered by Mark Wiener in a wry self-cosmological tie-in; Christian radicals, the mentally disabled, and overbearing mothers need not apply.—DL