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Agora: (Dario Marianelli) The most watched Spanish
film of 2009, grossing over $30 million in its first three months of
theatrical release,
Agora was an ambitious production financed
with $75 million in part from that country's leading cable television
film studio. Oscar-winning director and co-writer Alejandro Amenabar
submitted
Agora to the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and subsequently
at the Toronto International Film Festival but ran into poor audience
response at both. The challenges facing the film were two-fold; first,
it was too ambitious in the scope of its narrative, exploring far too
many intriguing lines of thought that are never fully realized.
Secondly,
Agora has also been protested by a notable religious
lobby for "promoting hatred of Christians," an understandably inevitable
reaction to the film's historical depiction about the fall of the Roman
Empire and the mass loss of knowledge in Alexandria that resulted from
the Christian fervor of the 4th Century. As Christianity spawned
religious warfare at the time, much of the world's scientific knowledge,
maintained by pagan intellectuals and philosophers in the city's central
library, was destroyed because it refuted the growing power of religious
doctrine. Among the leading minds of the library was Hypatia, a female
astronomer who devoted her life to the study of celestial orbits.
Because she challenged the notion that the sun revolved around the
Earth, she was seen by Christian mobs as being a responsible party in
the religious turmoil at the time and executed. There is no doubt that
Amenabar intended for the film to be statement about the importance of
intelligent logic, philosophical curiosity, and compassion across
societal and religious boundaries. Aside from the offense that this
emphasis has caused to the box office viability of
Agora, the
movie also suffered at times from questionable leaps in the narrative,
shoddy interior sets, and a lack of spark between the lead actors.
Still, the film was meant to be an epic of the highest order, its
somewhat restrictive budget perhaps making it more suitable for a
television-only release. One area in which there was no inhibition in
scope was in the music provided by Italian Academy Award winner Dario
Marianelli. For enthusiasts of the young composer's launch to fame
throughout the 2000's,
Agora represented Marianelli's overdue
return to the realm of magnificent orchestral force.
There is a minority of Marianelli enthusiasts who
pre-date the composer's highly popular classically-inclined scores for
Pride & Prejudice and
Atonement, and for these listeners,
Agora will reach back to the less dainty and more orchestrally
extravagant style of melodrama and action heard in
V for Vendetta
and
The Brothers Grimm. Without hesitation,
Agora can be
defined as Marianelli's most well-rounded career effort and one on a
massive scale, an epic of immense power and tragedy. Because of both the
downbeat personality of the film (knowledge lost, heroine executed, and
love unrealized) and the religious aspect of its rhetoric, Marianelli
responds with a score that is, if you can imagine, even more yearning in
character than
V for Vendetta. An unyielding brutality in the
darker half of
Agora is also reflective of the composer's earlier
mainstream works, though the loquacious portions of this score are more
intelligent in design that his previous efforts. Therein lies the key to
success with
Agora; its aptitude in balancing the musical
representations of the pagan society and it knowledge against the
Latin-chanted religious fervor. In the most basic sense, these elements
are embodied by wailing Middle-Eastern style vocals and the evocative
tone of the ney flute on one side and broad choral and brass tones on
the other. Marianelli's ability to clash these elements within the same
cue, culminating in a strangely accepting merging of the two by the time
of "Hypatia's Last Walk," is remarkable. Also of note is the composer's
distribution of duties within the ensemble, ranging from brutal bombast
of the most menacing kind from the depths of male voices and low brass
to elusive flute figures and light percussive lyricism that faintly
reminds of Georges Delerue's airy atmospheres. The former, an embodiment
of evil in the form of religious intolerance, is so monumentally huge in
its mostly harmonic performances during three or four cues in
Agora that casual listeners might think they are hearing a
portion of Howard Shore's
The Lord of the Rings material. In
"What Do the Skies See?," this sound specifically shatters the
beautifully lamenting female vocals. The traditional pagan side of the
plot yields these solo vocals and heartbreaking ney performances
throughout several of the conversational cues in the score. Many of the
score's cues (of both sides) are constructed in lengthy crescendos,
reminiscent again of
V for Vendetta's propulsive march to the
inevitable.
Thematically,
Agora is sufficiently cohesive,
though Marianelli's score emphasizes the texture of the often fragmented
three primary themes rather than applying them as frequent reminders of
identity. The primary theme is elusive in the first half of the album
but eventually highlights two of the score's momentous crescendos of
power at the end of "Two Hundred Thousand Books" and middle of "The
Skies Do Not Fall." This theme's rising structure, most robustly
expressed with enthusiasm at the start of "A Boat Experiment" and
toiling in contemplation in the first half of "If I Could Just Unravel
This" and middle portion of "The Truth is Elliptical," is the direct
opposite of the descending seven-note phrases representing the secondary
theme of tragedy in
Agora. While the primary, rising theme of
noble stature is afforded the film's most impressive visuals, the
tragedy theme is more lyrically romantic. Occupying all of "The Miracle
of the Bread," the latter half of "The Rule of the Parabalani," the
faint and ominous conclusion to "Ungodliness and Witchcraft," and a
strained background role in first half of "The Truth is Elliptical,"
this theme likely addresses the doomed romantic interests in the plot.
The theme for the Christians and their brainless convictions (and
alternatively the Romans) is foreshadowed in the second half of "An
Insult to the Gods" before exploding in "What Do The Skies See?" and "As
Christian As You Are" and informing an underlying rhythm early in "The
Truth is Elliptical." As mentioned before, Marianelli's creative
manipulation of the phrases of these three themes into nearly the entire
length of
Agora is, along with the equally important distribution
of strikingly balanced performances across the clefs (treble and bass)
and the ethnic spectrum, extremely impressive. The score is also well
balanced between the bravado of the impactful action and gorgeous
respites; the latter produces almost unparalleled beauty from "Have You
Ever Asked Yourself" to "The Miracle if the Bread" and "The Rule of the
Parabalani" to "If I Could Just Unravel This." The expertly mixed album
presents a story of engaging tragedy on its own, taking elements usually
anchored by stereotypes and allowing them to soar in perpetually
satisfying incarnations. The sole cue of distraction is "Orestes'
Offering," utilizing a bagpipe-like effect in a source role for a
traditional ceremony. Only released in Spain by Warner, the 57-minute
Agora album is a dramatic powerhouse worthy of a position in any
collection, and it easily resides among 2009's best scores.
***** Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download
| Bias Check: | For Dario Marianelli reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating
is 3.67 (in 9 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.37
(in 4,528 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The insert includes notes from the composer and director, as well as a synopsis
of the film, though all are in Spanish.
