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Review of The English Patient (Gabriel Yared)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if you were emotionally touched by the depictions of sorrow, alienation, and fate in the film and seek its appropriately somber and understated score.

Avoid it... if you expect the story's tragic romanticism to have any coherent organization on album, for Gabriel Yared's aimlessly wandering score and the plethora of source material causes a significantly disjointed listening experience.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

The English Patient: (Gabriel Yared) In a year of mediocrity and undemanding blockbusters, Anthony Minghella's The English Patient swept through the Academy Awards in 1996 with superb acting performances highlighting a strong adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's lauded novel. The narrative of the film tells of two love stories intertwined in the 1930's and 1940's, fantastically shot against the backdrop of North Africa and Italy. The film shifts between the past, present, and future at a whim, and requires the extremely compelling performances of Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliette Binoche, and Willem Dafoe to sustain interest in a romantic tragedy that unfolds without immediate synchrony. To say that The English Patient is tragic would be an understatement; the film takes melodrama to a level not often achieved, and don't expect the minimal redemption at the end of the film to salvage your mood. Minghella considered the music for The English Patient quite extensively before production began; his taste for various classical and folk music would assist in shaping the film's multicultural influences. He would look towards Western classicism of a Baroque style on one side while also exploring Hungarian folk music that, for most common listeners, is indistinguishable from the perception of Arabic or North African music. He assembled several pieces along these lines for source usage in the film, while his wife, who coordinated the dance sequences for The English Patient, suggested the swing songs that would also be used as source material for the production. The director placed the same level of importance on the underscore that would tie all of these ideas together; he claims that the only composer he had in mind from the conceptual step of the production was Gabriel Yared, the Lebanese-born classical-style artist working in France on internationally obscure romances at the time. After hiring Yared, Minghella insisted that the composer be a part of early production and attend various shooting sessions. He also instructed Yared to adapt and integrate the sounds of both the Baroque and Hungarian elements into his work, all the while infusing modern romanticism into the love story.

The resulting score would steal a Golden Globe and Academy Award away from a field of more deserving candidates that year, and Yared himself would go on to international fame that would land him major scoring assignments for years to come. What he provided for The English Patient was the right score for the right film at the right time. In the film, it fits well with the fatalistic and brooding nature of the plot, resulting in catapulted sales of the album over the long-term. For many film score enthusiasts, however, this score completely fails to function outside of the film's ambient personality, and in many regards, it's one of those rare cases where the film completely carries the score. Between the source music during the dance scenes and the piano performances by Binoche's character as integral to the plot, it's easy to imagine why the music from The English Patient was memorable enough to warrant the Oscar for most voters. But this success was only fractionally due to Yared's contribution. The score is extraordinarily restrained, which is why it doesn't work for most score collectors on album. He establishes two themes and develops them very sparsely throughout the work. Each features a power inherent in its structure, but Yared is sure to tail off each of their performances due to the unrealized love in the story. As such, both themes promise much in dramatic stature but deliver surprisingly little. The overarching theme of despair exists too infrequently to really define the score. Introduced on solo woodwind midway through the opening "The English Patient," the theme's only other major performance for the full orchestral ensemble would wait until "As Far as Florence" at the end. The second theme is the more yearning love affair, structured with the same broad strokes as a John Barry effort, and you can first hear this idea later in "The English Patient." That opening cue, serving as a suite of all the major ideas, opens with the solo Hungarian vocals of Márta Sebestyén, which may be too grating for most Western ears, and concludes with a brief statement of the despair and loneliness motif, heard on what seems to be a harpsichord and featuring a droning bass note of impending doom. Several other motifs are teased out during the score, but Yared never states them with enough deliberateness to make them effective tools of affiliation.

The love theme is typically considered the easiest identifier of Yared's work. It receives its first full realization in "Swoon, I'll Catch You" and receives a tender touch on piano in "Read Me to Sleep." Lengthy performances for this theme on strings would grace "The Cave of Swimmers" and "As Far as Florence." But even in these swells of passion, Yared's score fails to muster much energy. With a film depicting a frustrating tale of lost passion and doomed fate, the score follows in those exact footsteps. Never building to its full potential in emotion, each cue typically fades away to meanderings barely audible. Compared to the mesmerizing material that Yared would eventually produce for such dramas as Message in a Bottle and beyond, he wastes the power and elegance of the players from The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in The English Patient. The presence of the group seems to be based more on reputation for adept classical performances rather than the talent necessary to bring Yared's composition to life. The recording fails to exhibit any of the vibrance that the ensemble is capable of evoking; if anything, the score could have been performed with equal effectiveness by a studio group. Despite its noble and romantic intentions, the entire score fails to really capture the essence of any of the characters, and yet, in a very fitting way, it very well accompanies the desolate and lonely sands of the desert. Thus, you have to choose your poison. On album, the marginally interesting solos assist in breaking up the monotony; the vocals of Márta Sebestyén, the Hungarian folk artist, add a very brief sense of exotic setting, and John Constable's piano solos further develop the solitary emotions of the film. The occasional sprinkling of period songs causes distress because of their eclectic nature, resulting in an even more disjointed listening experience. Fans of arthouse films will find merit in the album as a souvenir from the film, though most listeners closer to the score collecting world will find it uninteresting, uninvolving, and underdeveloped. For a film about sorrow, alienation, and fate, the score is a great match. But who would want to listen to The English Patient repeatedly on album when there are so many more complex and melodramatic musical tragedies available for that mood?  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 75:11

• 1. The English Patient (3:30) • 2. A Retreat (1:21) • 3. Rupert Bear (1:22) • 4. What Else Do You Love? (1:00) • 5. Why Picton? (1:04) • 6. Cheek to Cheek - performed by Fred Astaire (3:15) • 7. Kip's Lights (1:24) • 8. Hana's Curse (2:06) • 9. I'll Always Go Back to That Church (1:48) • 10. Black Nights (1:53) • 11. Swoon, I'll Catch You (1:47) • 12. Am I K. In Your Book? (0:55) • 13. Let Me Come In! (2:35) • 14. Wang Wang Blues - performed by Benny Goodman (2:47) • 15. Convento Di Sant'Anna (9:09) • 16. Herodotus (1:04) • 17. Muzsikás - performed by Márta Sebestyén/Szerelem, Szerelem (4:32) • 18. Ask Your Saint Who He's Killed (1:04) • 19. One O'Clock Jump - performed by Benny Goodman (3:10) • 20. I'll Be Back (4:00) • 21. Let Me Tell You About Winds (0:55) • 22. Read Me To Sleep (4:56) • 23. The Cave Of Swimmers (1:55) • 24. Shepheard's Hotel Jazz Orchestra -- Where or When (source) (2:14) • 25. Aria from The Goldberg Variations - performed by Julie Steinberg (2:57) • 26. Cheek to Cheek - performed by Ella Fitzgerald (3:42) • 27. As Far as Florence (5:16) • 28. Én Csak Azt Csodálom (Lullaby for Katharine) (1:07)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert contains lengthy notes about the score and the film. Of his work on The English Patient, Yared has observed:

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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 The English Patient are Copyright © 1996, Fantasy Records and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 12/29/96 and last updated 2/17/08.