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| 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.
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.
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- 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 3.25
(in 16 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.06
(in 5,347 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
The film won the International Critics' Prize at the 1994 Cannes. Much of the score was
recorded in Bombay, India. The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
