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Review of Holy Smoke! (Angelo Badalamenti)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if you seek music as wayward as the film itself, combining mundane orchestral underscore with outstanding new age style original songs.

Avoid it... if the ten minutes of truly unique new age music by Angelo Badalamenti within the score is too close to Enya and Adiemus for your liking.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Holy Smoke!: (Angelo Badalamenti) Spiritual deprogramming is a fascinating topic sadly under-explored by Hollywood, and Jane Campion's Holy Smoke! promised to venture into that fertile territory. After directing The Piano and Portrait of a Lady, Campion combined her usual feminist theories with religious cults and brainwashing in her screenplay for Holy Smoke! The only problem was that her film was so convoluted that audiences couldn't figure out if her story was serious or an attempt at satire. Kate Winslet is an Australian who joins a cult in India, and upon being lured back home, her family has hired Harvey Keitel (a professional deprogrammer) to expunge the lies of her guru and return her to her normal self. The two end up in a halfway house in the middle of the desert for the three-day program, and all goes to hell when the film resorts to excessive nudity and sex (well, at least the script goes to hell). Where the two go from there depends on your tolerance for sappy, dumb endings. Critics uniformally blasted Holy Smoke! for not making its intent clear, its ridiculously absent-minded script failing to address or resolve any of the film's overarching ideas. Composer Angelo Badalamenti seemingly approached the film with the same wandering spirit. He stated that the experience of writing the score for Holy Smoke! in less than three days was somewhat of a religious one between him and Campion, and it really can be heard as such. With lengthy sequences in the film containing no dialogue and only Badalamenti score, his role in film's message is integral. Badalamenti's writing through the years has been as unpredictable as anyone in the business, ranging from lush and romantic dramas to bizarre and electronically distorted thrillers. It's nearly impossible to be a fan of every Badalamenti score, for he alters and replaces his own styles so frequently. For Holy Smoke!, Badalamenti applies these radical shifts to sections within the same score, making for an incongruous, but ultimately captivating listening experience.

It's a rare day for the film score collector when he or she actively seeks to skip the orchestral portions of a score in search of the electronic parts. Badalamenti's orchestral music is established in the early scenes of character building, and the drama on screen is only barely accentuated by the music. With a theme that barely registers, the orchestra is limp and uninspired, perhaps due to small size, but mostly because of Badalamenti's choice to provide surreal, minimalistic accompaniment for these scenes. A motif for both whiney and plucked violins in "Kiss All Around It" introduces the first hint of sexuality, reprised at the end of "Montage Finale." The electronic portions of the score allow both the sensual and religious elements to take flight, however, starting with the simmering keyboarded rhythm in "Waiting, Reaching, Seeking." A new age song erupts in "The Celebrations" and is expanded upon in "Maya, Mayi, Ma," a surprisingly attractive merging of Enya vocal styles with gorgeous flute performances and Adiemus-like choir and percussion. The ten minutes of this material on album is so unlike any traditional film score music of the era that you can't help but admire its cultural crossover intent. For the most part, these two cues are worth the price of the album. The vaguely East Indian elements in this and the rest of the score could have been better accentuated, though, and the sudden appearance of the new age style exposes Badalamenti's lack of foreshadowing or integration of anything like these cues in the previous cues. He does pull off one cue of great humor, though; in "Snappy Lipstick," he records a old time jingle with honky tonk piano, whistling, and big band woodwinds and percussion that'll quickly awaken you from the slumber that the surrounding underscore induced upon you. As for that orchestral underscore, Badalamenti's varied string cues simply don't hold the enthusiasm, spiritualism, and journeying spunk of the rest of the album. The three songs fit well with the film's plot, with the Neil Diamond appropriately opening the film. Annie Lennox's entry fits well with the surrounding "Maya, Mayi, Ma'" song by Badalamenti. Overall, it's a really bizarre score, but it leaves a truly lasting impression, something sadly failing in most film scores today.  ****

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 48:04

• 1. Holly Holy - performed by Neil Diamond (4:30) • 2. Betrayal of Ruth (2:27) • 3. Love Journey (3:25) • 4. Moonrise (2:16) • 5. Kiss All Around It (1:56) • 6. Waiting, Reaching, Seeking (3:52) • 7. Waltz in the Desert (2:12) • 8. Snappy Lipstick (2:08) • 9. Hallucination (2:10) • 10. I Put a Spell on You - performed by The Angels (4:01) • 11. The Celebration (2:47) • 12. Montage Finale (4:54) • 13. Primitive - performed by Annie Lennox (4:17) • 14. Maya, Mayi, Ma' (6:50)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert notes include an interesting page of experiences from Badalamenti regarding the conceptualization of the score.

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