Buy it... if you've always appreciated Mychael Danna's incorporation of Middle Eastern and East Indian elements into his scores, and would be curious to hear how they merge with Western strip club styles.

Avoid it... if Danna's plethora of whimsically-mixed ethnic vocals and instrumentation creates a fantasy world too disturbingly surreal and atmospheric for your tastes.

Danna

Exotica: (Mychael Danna) Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan was rising quickly through the ranks in the early 1990's, leading to the almost unanimously praised Exotica in 1994. Awarded with much hype at that year's Cannes Film Festival, the Egoyan project would build upon ideas in his The Adjuster story from a few years earlier and bring much of his cast and crew with him. The beauty of Exotica (if you could call it that) is its ability to tell its incongruent story lines, jumping across location and time with whimsy, while bringing all of those lines together with a stunning moment of clarity at the end of the picture. Films have attempted to do this for years, but Exotica is a remarkable success in its tightly woven plot. Perhaps the most intriguing element of the film is that it conveys the stories of overlapping personal tragedies against the backdrop of a strip joint, using its flashy central setting to give the film an erotic tilt without using that element as a significant part of the overarching plot. From the perspective of composer Mychael Danna, an artist yet to convincingly burst into the arthouse film music genre for a few more years to come, Exotica was a film in need of music addressing both the basic carnal sounds of the strip club as well as the highly inflective tragedy of the story. He further complicates his own job by curiously taking the score down familiar Middle Eastern paths explored elsewhere in his career. Despite the strip club's location in Toronto, Danna uses the lustful settings of the East within some of the club's acts to justify the incorporation of his extreme knowledge of Middle Eastern instruments and vocals into the score.

The dance music would occupy the majority of the film's most prominent music, understandably, and as it plays such an important role as source music in the film, the composer takes it very serious. Danna traveled the world and recorded vocal samples for use in Exotica, a seemingly bizarre endeavor until you hear the effectiveness of the score in the film. These vocals would be mixed brilliantly among traditional Western rock band elements (powerful percussion, guitar, and bass, mostly) and a variety of Middle Eastern specialty instruments for the strip pieces. The striking combination of cultural sounds works in Exotica (as opposed to a few other Danna scores where the cross-cultural approach is even more baffling). The pumping, charging erotic songs begin with the club's title piece, "Exotica" and explodes with power in "Dilko Tamay Huay." Perhaps more entertaining is the unashamed "Pagan Song" and its third world vocal styles. Arabic vocals and a ghazal provide flavor to an otherwise standard, strong electronic beat in these songs, with layers of other specialty instruments only adding to their appeal. By the time "Mujay Yaad" strikes with its extremely harsh vocal renderings, though, there is a significant disconnect between the erotic source music for the stripping and Danna's other half of the score. As the film continues to shift to the setting of a grim search in grassy fields seemingly completely unrelated to the gentleman's club, Danna develops a "truth" theme for the oud, an ancient Egyptian oboe of sorts that most listeners will likely recognize from Trevor Jones' score for the 1999 television production of Cleopatra.

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The weakness of Exotica is its shifting between the surrealistic and atmospheric field music, creepy and imbalanced at every moment, with the music for the club. Led by piano solos, these lightly thematic cues use electronic keyboarding to wash over the music with a sense of dreamy and flighty alienation. Further mystery is created by the performances of the shehnai, darabukha, and sarangi, cementing the very distinctive and foreign feel to the score. As the relationship between the film's two main characters is finally revealed in "The Ride Home," Danna develops the truth theme into its powerful and pulsating climax. It's at moments like these that Danna's unconventional combination of a traditional Western elements and instruments/vocals from Morocco to India doesn't matter. It's a downright creepy listening experience, retaining the undeniable erotic element while meandering just out of reach of total accessibility. As such, it's more interesting than Danna works like The Ice Storm and Eight Millimeter, and you might find that it serves a particular mood very well. Separating the source songs and score may be a necessity for anyone, however; while the source songs sound as though they could be genuinely be heard in a foreign-themed strip club, the visuals of the film are required to draw the connection between that half of the score and the uncomfortable but alluring tragedy of the remaining underscore. The mixing job for the score (in film and on album) needs to be recognized for its intelligent balance between the overbearing bass rhythms and the specialty instruments and vocals above them. The score is, at the very least, a technical piece of art.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Score as Written for the Film: ****
Score as Heard on Album: ***
Overall: ***

Bias Check:

For Mychael Danna reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.33 (in 12 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3 (in 3,845 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.