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Review of Agora (Dario Marianelli)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... if you appreciated Dario Marianelli's super-popular
scores for period romance dramas like Pride & Prejudice and
Atonement but have waited to hear him apply that tragic
romanticism to the impressively massive orchestral scale of V for
Vendetta and The Brothers Grimm.
Avoid it... if you simply cannot accept the application of stereotypical wailing female vocals and regional flutes in an obvious sonic battle against Latin chanting and orchestral bombast for the war between pagan knowledge and Christian fervor at the time of the Roman Empire's collapse, even if these elements are masterfully employed.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
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. *****
TRACK LISTINGS:
Total Time: 56:45
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert includes notes from the composer and director, as well as a synopsis
of the film, though all are in Spanish.
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Agora are Copyright © 2009, WEA/Warner Music Spain and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 1/20/10 (and not updated significantly since). Imagine where global society could be today if religious buffoonery had never existed. |
