Daily #7

The Brutalist_Brady Corbet’s creative bulimia extends further than this film’s score, which bears a connotation that is somewhat anomalous, spirited, even diseased. A score that lasts as long as the film does — which we all know is absolutely out of bounds — and is barely connected to the narration, rather, it is foreign body, in opposition to the film. In fact, we feel like we are watching a different film whose images have been discarded, a sound film that challenges, teases, attacks the ‘real’ one. The soundtrack might be Billie Holiday’s standards, jazz pieces, or original music by Daniel Blumberg, or even some atonal music. This mosaic of uneven tiles is enriched by special effects that mud them with far, distorted, altered voices. A spectral soundtrack inhabited by ghosts, one that might live in the mind of László Tóth.

Phantosmia_Lav Diaz is the inexhaustible repository of Filipino history and myth. Phantosmia is the story of Sergeant Hilarion Zabala, a soldier who can smell non-existing odours of psychological origin. In the film — in the four-hour-long film — there is nary a second of music, bar a haphazard guitar strum by the protagonist’s child. There is a soundtrack, though: the sounds of the tropical rainforest, the sound of infinite biome excitement growing under the vegetation. It is a masterpiece of beauty, cleanliness, diversity, thanks to sound register Cecil Buban and sound designer Corinne de San Jose.