BUCKING FASTARD_Ernst Reijseger is a Dutch avant-garde cellist and composer who has been Werner Herzog’s primary musical collaborator for over twenty years. Herzog explicitly stated that “Ernst is one of the great musicians of the planet, whose music is ahead of its time.” And there is no doubt that Herzog’s work over the past two decades – where documentaries take precedence over fiction films (though with Herzog, such distinctions must always be taken with a grain of salt), and where the visionary titanism of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo seems to have yielded to a meditation on dreams as an essential component of the human spirit – finds in Reijseger’s music a vital vehicle for probing that pursuit of the sublime and of truth that has always defined Herzog’s vision.
In this film, the Dutch composer conducts an acoustic ensemble alongside a string quartet to craft sound sequences fluctuating between a subtle atonality and a folk-inflected sensibility (such as when the sisters move to the countryside to live with their aunt). It is music as light as a breath of wind, because the film’s musicality already resonates within the sisters’ unison phrasing and their faces radiating faith in eternal love.
The score, therefore, never serves as mere background commentary to the musical aura projected by the Holbrooke sisters – for Herzog, the notion of a “musical commentary” is an outright blasphemy, as music must never comment, but reveal. Instead, it acts as a doubling of that aura: an effort to displace this magnetic force into an aesthetic, spiritual dimension.
Jean and Joan Holbrooke think, speak, even stumble over words in unison – a slip they once made together in court gives the film its title. Drawing on twins Freda and Greta Chaplin, known in 1980s Britain for their total symbiosis, Herzog turns the tale into a visionary fabl...
Shortly before the 1973 Chilean coup, CIA agents Chris and Lee are sent from Santiago to Easter Island by their superior, MJ. Amid the moai and the isolation of a remote paradise, the longtime partners confront a dark past and the conspiracies of the present. But Chris’s bon...
WILD HORSE NINE_In films set in periods with strong musical and geographic identities, an original score can easily find itself playing second fiddle to the era’s needle drops scattered throughout the runtime. It is not an indictment of the score’s quality, but rather the sheer economy of emotional leverage: instant, visceral recognition will almost always overshadow bespoke composition.
In McDonagh’s film, set in 1973, two 1966 tracks stand out in particular: Violeta Parra’s Gracias a la vida and The Rolling Stones’ Out of Time. The former is a hymn of gratitude for the profound ways humanity can express itself in the world, while the latter channels raw inadequacy and disarray. Seven years later, Chile would become yet another brutal testament to how chaos inevitably devours beauty.
