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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The first, and perhaps most important, aspect of the album to be aware of is the little quantity of score present. On an album of over an hour in length, only about twenty-five minutes of Yared's music appears, and it is spread mysteriously out of sequence throughout the album. The score material stands far apart from the jazzy songs of the era, and the two wrestle the album back and forth between them with a few awkward transitions in the process. The score itself is introverted and reflective, making use of a full orchestra, without utilizing any obvious or outward statements of theme. The title theme culminates into the lovely and gripping "Lullaby for Cain," performed by Sinead O'Connor over the end titles. Representing the turmoil within Ripley and his dissatisfaction with his identity, O'Connor's voice is both innocent enough to capture Ripley's childhood fantasies, and harsh enough at the corners to adequately portray Ripley's darker inclinations. Another impressive element of the score is Yared's incorporation of the sax, which plays an equally important role in the film, into many of the contemplative cues. In the end, however, these soft orchestral cues require close attention for full appreciation, and the attention on this album has clearly been placed with the jazz songs instead of the score. Personally, I don't care much for hip jazz of this era, and its monaural bounciness drives me nuts after only a few minutes (it's the same type of music that would drive me out of my local Tower Records as a kid because they'd always be blasting it in the older-pop and books sections). Had the lengthy tracks by the Guy Barker International Quintet and other been condensed into one section of the album, perhaps the score could be more easily appreciated for its subtleties. The most unfortunate turn in the album comes from track five to track six; the fifth track features a strongly vibrant twist of the string section, a la Bernard Herrmann, just to be followed by an upbeat jazz piece to break the mood. Therefore, overall, it's a score I'll most likely cut a few cues from onto a compilation with other Yared works. The lullaby is hauntingly effective, and its manifestations throughout the album (from O'Connor's vocals early to the cello performances on the last score track) are easily the highlight of the listening experience. Even if you enjoy the old, swinging jazz that played such a crucial role in the film, the disjointed placement of tracks on the album causes the jazz to swallow up Yared's tightly-wound and internally focused score. In the film, the combination of sounds has led to a Golden Globe nomination for Yared, even though part of the reason for that is most likely due to voters remembering the jazz throughout the score rather than the merits of the orchestral score on its own. If the album becomes a success, then it will have the jazz --not the score-- to thank for it. ***
* Original score by Gabriel Yared
"Music is at the heart of the film of The Talented Mr. Ripley. In adapting Patricia Highsmith's marvelous and profoundly disturbing novel from the fifties, it struck me that sound would more pungently and dynamically evoke the period in a film than the motif of painting Highsmith uses in her book. Jazz, with its mantra of freedom and improvisation, carries the burden of expression for the existential urges of Americans leaving home to redefine themselves in Europe. The film is full of such characters making themselves up, living in the moment. Jazz is their noise, and the film is enlivened by its energy and drive. At the same time, I felt that music might also provide the movie with a way of dramatising the thematic argument between two of the film's central characters. Accordingly, Dickie Greenleaf, son of a wealthy industrialist but living a sybaritic life in southern Italy, exchanges his paintbrush from the novel for an alto saxophone in the movie. Similarly, Tom Ripley, in the film story, becomes a classically trained pianist, with a personality as clenched as the most formal of fugues, arriving in Italy terrified of letting go, of speaking from the soul in that way jazz demands of its players. To impress Dickie, his new friend, Ripley learns about jazz, struggles through Charlie Parker, Chet Baker, Dizzy Gillespie. His taste and personality seem stolid in comparison to Dickie's freewheeling exuberance. But as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that, just as in music, where truly great extemporizing begins with Bach and Mozart, it is Ripley, the so-called square, who is the more genuine improviser. His ability to turn on a dime -- reel off the most elaborate riffs of fantasy contrasts sharply with Dickie, who is soon revealed as emotionally conservative and trapped in more conventional patterns of behaviour. Dickie's rebellion is evidently a passing phase, a correlative of the grand tour he is taking before settling down in New York, wild oats scattered, married, and assimilated. And in that sense, Ripley's journey, wilder and entirely unpredictable, is much closer, ironically, to the exhilarating chaos of a Bird solo or the searing meditations of Coltrane. The film dramatises these ideas in a continuous musical argument -- its title sequence identifies Ripley with classical music (he plays piano to accompany a lied for mezzo-soprano, is enraptured with the sound of Beethoven's Third Piano Quartet). Then Ripley's musical aesthetic is kept under wraps as the film's source and performed music is pursued exclusively through jazz. The sound of jazz dies along with Dickie, until its ghost is summoned towards the end of the movie, with a busker in the Piazza San Marco playing "You Don't Know What Love Is", echoing Dickie's alto solo after the suicide of his clandestine lover, Silvana. The film's tone darkens, and the music becomes increasingly tense and sober. As the screen finally goes to black, the magnificent John Martyn provides a specially recorded vocal version of the same song -- a reminder, through this most sophisticated of lyrics (though apparently written for an Abbott and Costello movie!) that Ripley's journey into a nightmare of his own making is motivated by a longing to be loved at any cost. The Talented Mr. Ripley is also dignified by a score from my friend and collaborator Gabriel Yared, who has been closely involved with the film since the earliest drafts of the screenplay. A good film composer -- and Gabriel is, without doubt, a great one -- can provide clues to a film's psychological gear changes, can intensify the movie and alert the audience to its ideas in the most subtle ways. With such significant episodes of performed music, Gabriel's score had to locate a voice that would neither invade what was preordained, nor be suffocated by it. The character of Ripley is a deliberately opaque one, and his inner being, its dislocations and yearnings, needed teasing out. Ripley often doesn't know or understand what he's feeling and yet his perspective is the one through which every moment of the film is refracted. Gabriel's task was, in part, to imagine he was listening to the troubled music of Ripley's heart and to make it heard. Gabriel's first sketches were an attempt to summon this music and also to suggest a nostalgia for a past that never really existed. So much of Ripley's personality is based on false premises -- the idea of a life lived by others and from which he is excluded, his profound dissatisfaction with who he is and where he comes from, the fantasy of a future in which he could be someone entirely different. Working in his studio on the Īle au Moines off the coast of Brittany, we agreed on a syncopated theme, Baroque in feel, which could be translated to a music box voicing, its inherent sweetness tinged with something strange and disquieting, mechanical, and repeated. Ripley hears it at moments when he is most unhinged or excited, most childlike. Its provenance undoubtedly owes something to a memory from my own childhood, when my grandmother kept a small music box in the shape of a gondola in her room, and its sound -- tiny and fragile and heartbreaking -- has stayed with me. This theme develops into the song, "Lullaby for Cain", which Gabriel and I wrote for the title sequence and which Sinead O'Connor performs with unadorned grace over the film's end credits. Ripley's compact with the Devil, the tragedy of his ambition, also needed to be charted in the score. Gabriel found a theme of mischief, voiced with vibraphone, cool and disassociated, and speaking of the period. We began to experiment with using the human voice, developing the idea of temptation, of finding some equivalent to the witches in Macbeth, or to sirens, luring Ripley onto the rocks of his folly. These voices, unreliable and tantalising, ridicule Ripley's alienation; delight when he sells his soul; then mock his tragedy when, after having given everything not to be alone, he finds himself imprisoned in the solitary confinement of his mind. Such ironies and musical games are central to the film's architecture, and they are written into the screenplay as a kind of code. The music has huge entertainment value but is also, I believe, a character in its own right. The current obsession in the movies to have everything explained is often mirrored by music, which tells you what to think and feel at any given moment, and just as this movie wants to believe that an audience is happier extrapolating meaning and moral rhythms from what it sees, so this movie's music is used with the faith that the audience can also extrapolate from what it hears."
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