Bear naked
Grizzly Man and 9 Songs study love in a cold climate.
By Kimberly Chun

SNOW, GLACIERS , arctic tundra – why do these icy images summon hot thoughts, ruminations on obsessive passion and steamy tangles on living room furniture? Are we just too cool to feel anything, beyond the meteorological extremes?

That would seem to be the case watching 9 Songs' protagonist Matt (Kieran O'Brien) moon over the snowy crags of Antarctica, while flashing back on his tempestuous time with girlfriend Lisa (Margo Stilley) and measuring it by the concerts they'd attend. Director Michael Winterbottom's somewhat improvised, low-budget, occasionally riveting, and occasionally annoying knockout captures the texture of a real, if superficial, tryst, with plenty of real sex, buck nudity, accidental beauty, Brit pop, and new rock.

The cold reaches of the Kodiak archipelago also touch the heart of German filmmaking legend and Grizzly Man documentarian Werner Herzog, who presents the fascinating life and gruesome death of self-styled grizzly expert, wildlife preservationist, and ex-actor Timothy Treadwell. Treadwell lived for five seasons, without a gun, with his beloved bears in Alaska's Katmai National Park and Reserve, extensively videotaping his own life and his wildlife for a nature series before he was killed and devoured along with his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, in 2003. The Alaskan snow only enters the picture once, as Herzog flies over stupendous stretches of white-frosted peaks, likening the rocky, unpredictable terrain to Treadwell's spirit, which he takes care to portray completely, with its ups, downs, nuances, and shadows.

Crazy beautiful

Of course, English glaciologist Matt feels nostalgic for shadow, crossing Antarctica's immense, silent continent of ice and thinking back to the hot sex he shared with 21-year-old American expat Lisa. The banks of ice find their rhyming imagery in Lisa's watery white body, so often naked and entirely eclipsing her lover's darker form. Her nipples turn into visual punctuation in her many sex scenes, her face in mid-orgasm a recurring motif. Stilley looks like a slender, boyish Maggie Gyllenhaal – hers is the slightly tweaked beauty of a keyboardist in an indie pop band – and Matt looks a smidge like Jack Kerouac, so those hoping to get off on 9 Songs' plentiful sex will find many what-if?, sex-symbols-for-brainy-types fantasies here. But we never forget, and he never forgets, that she is truly the erotic focus, warm and playful at the beach to the sound of Franz Ferdinand, or curled against crumpled sheets that look like snow or marble.

"No man had been here till the 20th century," our fearless glaciologist pronounces later, looking out over the seamless whiteness of glacier country; not so with his lover, whom he later describes as "21. Beautiful. Egotistical. Careless. Crazy," willing to alternately play passive possum and lash out, as when she declares, "Sometimes I want to bite your lip really fucking hard and make it bleed."

The weather outside at the South Pole is frightful, but the memories inside are delightful, as Matt thinks back to the moment they meet, sorting each other among the many other bodies as Black Rebel Motorcycle Club run through "Whatever Happened to Rock 'n' Roll?" at the Brixton Academy. Images of communal bonding among strangers at shows by Super Furry Animals, Elbow, and others are interspersed with shots of the pair, naked and clearly bonding in his dark, elegantly decaying apartment, as if the film were a micro-Kama Sutra set to song.

Live music becomes a way to connect with other fans, and then a kind of foreplay for sex scenes. We have a shot of the Von Bondies racing through "C'mon C'mon" as the couple, in the throes of new-relationship jollies, goes from making breakfast in Matt's kitchen to making love on a living room commode, the sun pouring between the pair, silhouetting them and reducing them to elemental light and shadow. Winterbottom leaves the dust motes gathering on the lens as Matt goes down on Lisa (who is the top more often than not) and blinding light seems to pour between their lips. With raw lighting effects evoking the mystical blow job of Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny, you glimpse a little of the ecstasy that fuels a budding romance, and similarly, 9 Songs' sex – complete with hardcore penetration and money shot – becomes a charged, dramatic way for men to look at women. Even as Lisa is blindfolded and bound, her sexual responses are the main attraction, the hook, the headliner.

With a reverence for women and song that echoes Nick Hornby, Winterbottom finds a parallel between the sight of fucking figures, burned out of shadow by sunlight, and his selection of concert footage – even Dig!'s obnoxious Dandy Warhols sound postcoital and drowsy. But inevitably, considering the brevity of this coupling (at nine songs, the length of a short set) matters sour in predictable ways. When the lovers head out to the beach, Lisa reveals, with the annoying glibness of an American tourist, that she's collected an international smorgasbord of lovers. The pair indulge in mild bondage as Matt ties Lisa up, and she fantasizes about watching another "hot" couple on a Thai shore. Booorrring. Around then the viewer begins to weary of the tedious sameness in the sex and the musical choices. Lisa's irksome Anglo-American accent doesn't help.

But so it goes with music and love: If you're a fan, the bands, performances, and songs will subtly differentiate themselves. If you're not, they'll all sound alike. Likewise, if you're in deep, as Matt is with Lisa, the variations on the theme of lovemaking will emerge from shadow and grow in meaning. Because for all its overt, in-your-face fucking, 9 Songs finds its power in shades of emotion and Winterbottom's digital video gradations of blue, black, gray, and white. It's a tone poem to music and memory, grafted together with graphic sex. The difficulties of getting a clear connection persist, and one leaves 9 Songs feeling like one knows the wild quirks and contours of Lisa's body backward and forward, missionary and doggy-style, but realizing that, perhaps like Matt, much of her interior remains unexplored. Her heart is as inaccessible as an iceberg. And perhaps that's why a lovelorn iceman is left to study frosted plains rather than that boyish frame.

Gristle and bone

Herzog has shot his share of nonnarrative cinematic poetry, but he refrains in Grizzly Man, giving the fascinating story of the late activist, would-be nature-doc star, and wannabe grizzly Treadwell a wide, respectful berth, as if he wanted to allow the slumbering beast within Treadwell to come out and caper on film. To that end, he uses extensive video shot by the self-made grizzly expert, of himself and his animals, permitting them the space and air they seem to demand. The rest of Grizzly Man is shaped through interviews with Treadwell's friends – including Jewel Pavalak, his tearful ex-girlfriend and cofounder of his nonprofit Grizzly People; an emotionally involved coroner; and a singing pilot straight out of a Marlboro ad – and skeptical observers who viewed the naturalist as insane and/or naïve in his violation of the unspoken boundaries between animals and humans, lines the region's indigenous people have respected for eons.

Most striking, however, is the way Herzog often steps back and admires Treadwell's footage as a fellow filmmaker – "the images most filmmakers can only dream of" and video that's amazing for what it reveals both of the wilds and the Grizzly Man himself. There are hauntingly powerful images of battling grizzlies (named Sgt. Brown and Mickey in Treadwell's typically cutesy, childlike style, one that seems readymade for educational TV) latching onto each other's heads with massive jaws until dung pours out of one combatant (or as Treadwell puts it delicately for his audience, "He went to the bathroom"). Like a proud mentor, Herzog points to seemingly inert, actionless shots that capture the mysterious glamour of nature, as a sudden breeze catches a bower. The New German Cinema titan is transfixed by the passion Treadwell pours into praying for life-giving rain for starved grizzlies driven to cannibalizing their young, and subtly name-checks his "best fiend" Klaus Kinski when Treadwell rants against the park service and those who might stand between him and his grizzlies. "His rage is almost incandescent, artistic," Herzog notes almost lovingly, because he has seen this fury "fighting civilization itself" before on film – and in that sense, Treadwell slips perfectly into a pantheon of madmen, obsessives, visionaries, and, of late, wilderness survivors such as those in 1999's Wings of Hope and 1997's Little Dieter Must Fly.

It's rarer still for Herzog to take on a love story, but that's a part of the tale of Treadwell, a failed actor and a man who answered the siren song of the bear's simpler world, to borrow the words of a bear biologist. It seems, as Treadwell bemoans the intricacies of romancing human women on video, that he was always looking for love, and he found it mainly in bears (as well as, it turns out, in the mysterious Huguenard). As he and his friends repeat throughout the documentary, Treadwell wouldn't have perished any other way, and perhaps the consummation of his passion for the bears, when he was consumed by one of the objects of his affection, is the real love that dare not speak its name.

But in the end, Grizzly Man becomes a dialogue or interplay between filmmakers, one that allows Herzog to comfortably find himself in the story, inserting himself to contradict Treadwell's sentimentalized view of nature and, most noticeably, entering the frame to listen to the audio of the capped video camera left running as Treadwell and his girlfriend were attacked. As Herzog listens on a headset, Pavalak watches him, wide-eyed, and when he tells her to never listen to the tape, to destroy it, and that he won't include it in the film, the moment both stands out and throws you apart from the narrative. Respectfully mediated, delicately conveyed, and perhaps even self-serving in the way that Herzog telegraphs his own sensitivity – the instance foregrounds how similar Treadwell and Herzog are in strategy, even as their footage conjoins in Grizzly Man. In contrast to the self-enclosed loop of live music and sex in 9 Songs, which finally adds up to yawning absence and yearning, Grizzly Man points outward, with a kind of hope, toward a love that transcends death and remains out of the reach of poachers and exploiters.

'9 Songs' and 'Grizzly Man' open Fri/12 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.