Shame
http://www.imdb.com/rg/em_share/rt_ipad/title/tt1723811
It has been a long time since I felt the most appropriate adjective for a film was "powerful". Of late there have been a few that have qualified as intriguing, tense, poetic or evocative, and also quite a lot that I could at best describe as trite, rubbish or simply disappointing but it's been a good long time since there was a "powerful" coming at me off the big screen where I have been riveted from start to finish. This is in many respects a really simple film: there is practically no plot, no special effects, not even that much dialogue. A man lives alone and works in an office. His sister comes to stay, which upsets his usual routines and he starts to unravel. By the end, his life appears to have returned to normal, more or less. That's it. But the performances of the brother and sister by Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan absolutely bowled me over; and, even better, the music is intelligently used in a way that genuinely supports and enhances the narrative.
The siblings, Brandon and Sissy, each have their own type of music. Brandon listens to recordings of Glen Gould playing Bach (you can tell these are the Gould recordings because you can hear the pianist humming faintly in the background in the final track used). Sissy listens to popular music and sings jazz standards in posh bars for a living. This distinction in their musical choices reflects their characters, at least on the surface. Sissy is a free spirit, emotional, extrovert, dressing in brightly coloured, multi-pattern vintage clothing. Brandon is up tight, controlled, orderly. His apartment is tidy to the point of impersonality, decorated in the same muted blues and greys that he also wears. Typically, Hollywood uses a classical versus popular music association to make comments on characters - this is, after all, exactly the same pattern of association as in Stepmom, where lovely, free-spirited and put-upon Julia Roberts listens to popular music and up-tight old meanie Susan Sarandon listens to Rossini, a clear indication that she lacks the emotional authenticity of Julia; but finds her rehabilitation as a character by giving up that awful classical stuff and dancing to retro pop songs with her children. This kind of rather heavy handed use of classical music to suggest that there is some moral flaw in a character is very common, and in fact the first piece of music we hear Brandon listen to is the same Goldberg variation that we see and hear Hannibal Lecter playing at the start of Hannibal. But interestingly, in Shame there is no sense that the music is being used to comment on Brandon's morality - it is simply part of how his and Sissy's almost diametrically opposite natures are articulated, even more surprising given how easy it would be to start making moral judgements about him.
Neither sibling is quite what we might first think. Carefree Sissy is a basket case, insecure, chaotic, needy; Brandon is a sex addict. While Sissy announces her presence in Brandon's apartment by playing a record whose repeated words are "I need your love" (little clue there, obviously), Brandon is unable to connect to anyone on any level other than sex, and this makes his relationship with Sissy highly problematic as she is clearly off limits - although it is never directly broached, there is a tension in their relationship that suggests he is deeply uncomfortable around a woman he cannot have sex with. Underneath their surface differences, the siblings are actually very similar, just dealing with things differently. Sissy writes her vulnerability in large letters, her big musical moment being her rendition, in a bar, of "New York, New York", very slow and sparsely accompanied, leaving her voice fragile, slightly insecure, exposed. Brandon's music also conceals a message about his own vulnerabilities. While the use of Bach articulates the contrast with Sissy, the use of the Gould recordings is also pointed: Gould was notoriously eccentric and found it very difficult to engage with the professional musical world, retiring from performing at the age of 31, and focusing instead on almost obsessive recording and re-recording of Bach's music. These exquisite recordings conceal (barely, thanks to the humming) his social disfunction, working here as a metaphor for the way that Brandon's controlled veneered conceals an obsessive sexual disfunction. Why he is like this is never explored or explained: near the end of the film, Sissy says "we're not bad people, we just come form a bad place", suggesting there may be some trauma from their childhood that has left them this fabulously messed up, but there is no exposition, no explanation, just as the is no moralising. In fact, the work that the other music in the film does is to focus us not on the sexiness of the sex (and Brandon really does have quite a lot of sex in this film, not all of it in person (some online), not all of it successful, and not all of it with women) but on the desperation of it. The music at the start of the film is a slow, sombre piece for string orchestra, very beautiful but saying as clearly as possible that this is not going to be a happy and uplifting film - it scores our first sight of Brandon as he wakes, gets up, goes to work on the subway and very nearly picks up the married woman sitting opposite him. It comes back again at the end of the film as he wanders around the city, picking up a random man and going to the back room of a gay bar with him before visiting two women in their apartment and having prolonged sex with them. It is incredibly graphic but the slow, searingly tragic music takes away any voyeuristic titillation and just makes it all seem utterly desperate,with the sheer beauty of the music lending a kind of poetry to the idea that he is suffering, that there is no pleasure in the sex, only a terrible, driven need that never goes away. By no stretch of the imagination are Brandon and Sissy nice people but by the end of the film, I only felt desperately sorry for them. Film is very good at using music to impose an interpretation of the visual imagenon its audience,and from that point of view this film is no different. But the extent to to which the music works against the obvious meaning in the images and renders Brandon sympathetic rather than simply condemning him, makes for a genuinely powerful film.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
The Artist
The Artist
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/
It turns out I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who just likes to pick holes in things. The critics all seem utterly in love with this film but I am slightly less enthusiastic. I liked it, not denying that: it has a whimsical charm which manages to stop on the right side of cloying, but musically it was unexpectedly disappointing, given that it is busy sweeping the boards for best original music with a Golden Globe already in the bag and a BAFTA looking likely. It got off to a very good start (and this was typical of a number of sonic double bluffs and sleights of hand which cropped up at regular intervals) as we began with a dramatic episode of what was evidently our hero being tortured by evil Russians, only to take a step back and discover we were watching a film within a film, and that the orchestral music we were hearing was the live orchestra we now saw playing along to the film in a 1927 movie theatre. Only it wasn't: it became rapidly obvious that the music we were hearing could not be coming from the visible orchestra as the conductor's beat was not quite synchronised and the movements of the players did not match the sound; added to which there was a complete absence of any kind of sound coming from the variously gasping and laughing members of the audience. Welcome to the world of The Artist, a mostly but not quite silent movie that paradoxically tells the story of how the talkies killed off the silents. Other diegetic musical games are played elsewhere, most notably a dream sequence in which the hero, George, discovers that everything and everyone can make sounds except him, so we hear the sound of a glass as it is placed on a table, we hear footsteps and laughter, but George himself talks, then shouts, utterly silently. Finally, he sees a feather falling gently through the air, which touches the ground with a shockingly loud crash as George screams soundlessly and wakes. The sequence at the end also allows sound back in, but otherwise this is, if not a genuinely silent film, nonetheless a diegetically silent film in that other than these episodes, the only sound is the music that accompanies the image. And the music is not great, alas (sorry not to be as taken with it as wveeryone else seems to be). Ironically, the most successful sequences are often those written to accompany the films within the film, where Ludovic Bource scores more obviously to the action, and uses a more varied palette of musical gestures. The problem with the bulk of the score is that it is simply too repetitive, a series of often quite long cues that use a single riff ad infinitum for an entire scene. It reminded me a little of the music used in The Sting (1973), set at a similar time to The Artist, which used a series of arrangements of piano rags by Scott Joplin to evoke the period and provide a fairly light, emotionally understated and rather charming underscore that I am very fond of. A similar strategy is less successful here, because the understated musical sound of the The Sting was balanced by all the other sound in the film, and here there really is no other sound for the majority of the film. Some of it is scored more dramatically, especially in the latter part of the film but overall it just isn't particularly interesting music: Bource largely pastiches 1920s dance music and to some extent pastiches what I think we assume silent movie music would have sounded like, and its all terribly charming, but I'm not convinced its particularly interesting. Some of the most striking moments are actually when the music stops and we have a period of absolute silence as the characters "talk", not only soundlessly but without even the ambient, background sound of the environment in which we see them - it's shockingly disconcerting when suddenly the only thing you can hear is the shuffling and breathing of the other members of the audience around you and you suddenly realise exactly what Adorno was talking about when he described a film experienced in silence as 'uncanny'. The dream sequence is one of those moments - no music at all, just the sound design (quickest gig for any sound designer in recent history, I imagine) and is really effective as a result. But alas, although I enjoyed both the film and the experiment, the fact that I can't help listening to the music meant that I found some of it desperately annoying in its relentless repetitions, curmudgeon that I am.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655442/
It turns out I'm a miserable old curmudgeon who just likes to pick holes in things. The critics all seem utterly in love with this film but I am slightly less enthusiastic. I liked it, not denying that: it has a whimsical charm which manages to stop on the right side of cloying, but musically it was unexpectedly disappointing, given that it is busy sweeping the boards for best original music with a Golden Globe already in the bag and a BAFTA looking likely. It got off to a very good start (and this was typical of a number of sonic double bluffs and sleights of hand which cropped up at regular intervals) as we began with a dramatic episode of what was evidently our hero being tortured by evil Russians, only to take a step back and discover we were watching a film within a film, and that the orchestral music we were hearing was the live orchestra we now saw playing along to the film in a 1927 movie theatre. Only it wasn't: it became rapidly obvious that the music we were hearing could not be coming from the visible orchestra as the conductor's beat was not quite synchronised and the movements of the players did not match the sound; added to which there was a complete absence of any kind of sound coming from the variously gasping and laughing members of the audience. Welcome to the world of The Artist, a mostly but not quite silent movie that paradoxically tells the story of how the talkies killed off the silents. Other diegetic musical games are played elsewhere, most notably a dream sequence in which the hero, George, discovers that everything and everyone can make sounds except him, so we hear the sound of a glass as it is placed on a table, we hear footsteps and laughter, but George himself talks, then shouts, utterly silently. Finally, he sees a feather falling gently through the air, which touches the ground with a shockingly loud crash as George screams soundlessly and wakes. The sequence at the end also allows sound back in, but otherwise this is, if not a genuinely silent film, nonetheless a diegetically silent film in that other than these episodes, the only sound is the music that accompanies the image. And the music is not great, alas (sorry not to be as taken with it as wveeryone else seems to be). Ironically, the most successful sequences are often those written to accompany the films within the film, where Ludovic Bource scores more obviously to the action, and uses a more varied palette of musical gestures. The problem with the bulk of the score is that it is simply too repetitive, a series of often quite long cues that use a single riff ad infinitum for an entire scene. It reminded me a little of the music used in The Sting (1973), set at a similar time to The Artist, which used a series of arrangements of piano rags by Scott Joplin to evoke the period and provide a fairly light, emotionally understated and rather charming underscore that I am very fond of. A similar strategy is less successful here, because the understated musical sound of the The Sting was balanced by all the other sound in the film, and here there really is no other sound for the majority of the film. Some of it is scored more dramatically, especially in the latter part of the film but overall it just isn't particularly interesting music: Bource largely pastiches 1920s dance music and to some extent pastiches what I think we assume silent movie music would have sounded like, and its all terribly charming, but I'm not convinced its particularly interesting. Some of the most striking moments are actually when the music stops and we have a period of absolute silence as the characters "talk", not only soundlessly but without even the ambient, background sound of the environment in which we see them - it's shockingly disconcerting when suddenly the only thing you can hear is the shuffling and breathing of the other members of the audience around you and you suddenly realise exactly what Adorno was talking about when he described a film experienced in silence as 'uncanny'. The dream sequence is one of those moments - no music at all, just the sound design (quickest gig for any sound designer in recent history, I imagine) and is really effective as a result. But alas, although I enjoyed both the film and the experiment, the fact that I can't help listening to the music meant that I found some of it desperately annoying in its relentless repetitions, curmudgeon that I am.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/
I am a bit disappointed by the new Sherlock Holmes movie on many counts, alas. Loved the first film with a passion that if not exactly fiery was certainly sincere: good characters, suitably convoluted plot, some well handled set pieces, genuinely both funny and dramatic, which is surprisingly hard to do well, very good pace sustained over a fairly long movie, some fabulous special effects, especially those involving Sherlock's ability to think through the moves of an encounter in advance - all in all, hard to fault, added to which the sound design (again, especially in relation to Sherlock's thinking through) was gorgeous and the music was, if not the most fantastically lovely score ever written, nonetheless full of character and very original in its timbral palette (and ruthlessly pastiched - I hesitate to say ripped off - by the BBC's TV series, broadcast shortly after).
The second film is a poor copy in almost every respect. Irene Adler, one of the most interesting characters of the first film, is written off in the first ten minutes and female interest is taken over mostly by Simsa, a gypsy woman, who never really gets a chance to be much more than a plot device (although the newly married Mary Watson has a couple of great scenes, not least with the sublimely naked Stephen Fry as Mycroft, and her dry wit on discovering that there is a second Holmes is one of my fabourite lines in the film). The only competitor for the humour of the first film is Sherlock's attempt to develop a new type of urban camouflage, which is so utterly ridiculous that it has to be seen to be believed. Literally.
Musically, it's all very bitty. The first time I saw it (yes, indeed, went back in order to listen properly) it seemed rather nondescript and mostly what I noticed were the moments when the Sherlock theme from the first film came thumping in (and boy, did it thump); and the again delicious sound design which is playful and unusual in the way it distorts, exaggerates and represents the likely sound of an event in a very abstract way, bordering more on electroacoustic composition at times than sound design in the more traditional, foley sense. On second listening, there are musical themes, principally a Moriarty theme that grumbles away in the bass every time we see him or someone talks about him (yawn); rather less of the Sherlock theme than I expected, just occasionally so thumpy that it's all I remembered from first viewing; and what I think may be an Irene Adler theme that therefore disappears after the first 10 minutes once she exits the story and is never heard again. But the are lots and lots of individual ideas in cues that appear once (occasionally twice in quick succession) and are then abandoned, and this keeps going right the way through, including two brand new ideas in the last ten minutes of the film.
Granted, I have no doubt that pretty much no one except me and the other fusty old purists even noticed this, but to a fusty old purist such as I it seems both very uneconomical and actually rather lazy. Why keep inventing new (not hugely interesting) material when you have perfectly good existing themes that can be reworked and reinvented to bring more depth to the overall narrative? For example, I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say the film's climax is the original Conan Doyle plot device of Sherlock sacrificing himself to defeat Moriarty by throwing himself, with the villain, into the Reichenbach falls. Hans Zimmer gives us brand new music for this (which he's borrowed from something I can't place, incidentally). But musically, wouldn't it be much more logical and satisfying to use a transformed but recognisable version of Sherlock's own theme? Takes more thought and work and imagination, perhaps, but that's the type of thing that makes film music really good and interesting and meaningful, and why people employ a particular composer to score a film rather then just using stock cues from music libraries. Hey ho. OK, rant over. Loved the sound design, and it passed a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, but alas, I think Mr Zimmer does not actually know how to score a sequel (I know everyone was terribly impressed by Dark Knight, but again it was a very lazy score and not a patch on his Batman Begins).
One other interesting thing in this film is that there are a number of set musical pieces: various Lieder about fish (which ties in well with various things going on in the plot, including poor old Sherley (as Mycroft calls him) getting rather hideously hooked by Moriarty at one point; but less explicably, have an Irish reel as the music for a set piece fight involving a Kossack, a French gypsy and Sherlock, and a little bit of Don Giovanni later on which didn't quite work: it seemed to be trying to make a connection between the plot of Mozart's opera and the events going on in the film at that point, but I couldn't work out what (and I'm the blasted musicologist in the audience!).
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/
I am a bit disappointed by the new Sherlock Holmes movie on many counts, alas. Loved the first film with a passion that if not exactly fiery was certainly sincere: good characters, suitably convoluted plot, some well handled set pieces, genuinely both funny and dramatic, which is surprisingly hard to do well, very good pace sustained over a fairly long movie, some fabulous special effects, especially those involving Sherlock's ability to think through the moves of an encounter in advance - all in all, hard to fault, added to which the sound design (again, especially in relation to Sherlock's thinking through) was gorgeous and the music was, if not the most fantastically lovely score ever written, nonetheless full of character and very original in its timbral palette (and ruthlessly pastiched - I hesitate to say ripped off - by the BBC's TV series, broadcast shortly after).
The second film is a poor copy in almost every respect. Irene Adler, one of the most interesting characters of the first film, is written off in the first ten minutes and female interest is taken over mostly by Simsa, a gypsy woman, who never really gets a chance to be much more than a plot device (although the newly married Mary Watson has a couple of great scenes, not least with the sublimely naked Stephen Fry as Mycroft, and her dry wit on discovering that there is a second Holmes is one of my fabourite lines in the film). The only competitor for the humour of the first film is Sherlock's attempt to develop a new type of urban camouflage, which is so utterly ridiculous that it has to be seen to be believed. Literally.
Musically, it's all very bitty. The first time I saw it (yes, indeed, went back in order to listen properly) it seemed rather nondescript and mostly what I noticed were the moments when the Sherlock theme from the first film came thumping in (and boy, did it thump); and the again delicious sound design which is playful and unusual in the way it distorts, exaggerates and represents the likely sound of an event in a very abstract way, bordering more on electroacoustic composition at times than sound design in the more traditional, foley sense. On second listening, there are musical themes, principally a Moriarty theme that grumbles away in the bass every time we see him or someone talks about him (yawn); rather less of the Sherlock theme than I expected, just occasionally so thumpy that it's all I remembered from first viewing; and what I think may be an Irene Adler theme that therefore disappears after the first 10 minutes once she exits the story and is never heard again. But the are lots and lots of individual ideas in cues that appear once (occasionally twice in quick succession) and are then abandoned, and this keeps going right the way through, including two brand new ideas in the last ten minutes of the film.
Granted, I have no doubt that pretty much no one except me and the other fusty old purists even noticed this, but to a fusty old purist such as I it seems both very uneconomical and actually rather lazy. Why keep inventing new (not hugely interesting) material when you have perfectly good existing themes that can be reworked and reinvented to bring more depth to the overall narrative? For example, I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say the film's climax is the original Conan Doyle plot device of Sherlock sacrificing himself to defeat Moriarty by throwing himself, with the villain, into the Reichenbach falls. Hans Zimmer gives us brand new music for this (which he's borrowed from something I can't place, incidentally). But musically, wouldn't it be much more logical and satisfying to use a transformed but recognisable version of Sherlock's own theme? Takes more thought and work and imagination, perhaps, but that's the type of thing that makes film music really good and interesting and meaningful, and why people employ a particular composer to score a film rather then just using stock cues from music libraries. Hey ho. OK, rant over. Loved the sound design, and it passed a reasonably entertaining couple of hours, but alas, I think Mr Zimmer does not actually know how to score a sequel (I know everyone was terribly impressed by Dark Knight, but again it was a very lazy score and not a patch on his Batman Begins).
One other interesting thing in this film is that there are a number of set musical pieces: various Lieder about fish (which ties in well with various things going on in the plot, including poor old Sherley (as Mycroft calls him) getting rather hideously hooked by Moriarty at one point; but less explicably, have an Irish reel as the music for a set piece fight involving a Kossack, a French gypsy and Sherlock, and a little bit of Don Giovanni later on which didn't quite work: it seemed to be trying to make a connection between the plot of Mozart's opera and the events going on in the film at that point, but I couldn't work out what (and I'm the blasted musicologist in the audience!).
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