Athena_One, two, three – the film starts and with it, its soundtrack. It will never stop, either, if not on rare occasions, and seldom struggling out of the agitated layer of voices that is the base of the film’s sound. Liquid/digital magniloquence, with the open goal of helping out the music, lionizing the banlieue uprising, and transforming its representation from urban conflict to mythological war, like the Greeks and the Trojans. Alas, the attempt fails. All is left is sweetish, sugary sound.
Bones and All_Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross belong to the long line-up of rock musicians who, at some point in their career, switched to film music. Examples: Jonny Greenwood, Radiohead guitarist and twice an Oscar nominee for Best Original Score; Bryce Dessner, who composed the music for Iñárritu’s latest, BARDO, in the main competition at the VFF; and the great Nick Cave, with his preference for western. Reznor and Ross won the Oscar twice: in 2011, with The Social Network and in 2021 with Soul. The soundtrack they authored for Guadagnino is a masterpiece of minimalistic folk, where prominence is given to the spare sound of a barely-picked acoustic guitar and occasionally a piano for a phantasmatic, haunted sound. Maybe it is music that will reveal the secret of the film: it’s not a movie on American cannibals, it is a fantastic road trip in the folds of America.
Monica_Pallaoro’s film has barely any score, if not for a handful of songs that Monica listens to in her car. Among them, we mention with joyful reverence Common People by Pulp, which Rolling Stone declared the best Britpop tune of all time.
