Blow It Up & Start Again

Olivier Assayas' superb Carlos is notable for numerous reasons, some of which I will hopefully tackle when I write about it in my end-of-year list, in which it will most probably feature.
But one of its most obvious strengths is its soundtrack, and that I want to write about now. Assayas has always placed a great deal of importance in his soundtrack choices; from the scores he has commissioned from Sonic Youth and John Cale to the terrific taste he displays in his selections of songs in his films, from the Incredible String Band through Brian Eno and Pere Ubu to Metric.

Instead of going for a contemporaneous collection of era-evocative pop and rock hits, he fills the Carlos soundtrack with post-punk songs, most of them out of step chronologically with the historical scenes they accompany. This suggests that Assayas wants us to pick up on the elements of Carlos' personality - or that of the film itself - captured by the songs in all their angular, jerky appeal.

Post-Punk is musically a far more diverse, complex and interesting sub-genre than Punk itself. Poppier, more intellectual, there is an undeniable chill to some of the music Assayas selects. It is all cold, scratchy guitars and mathematical rhythms, lead vocals in a bored monotone, impenetrable or vaguely Punkish nihilistic lyrics. Much of the film is set in wintry 70s Europe, in cities like the Hague, Paris, Vienna and Budapest, and this music is a perfect fit. He also cuts many songs off before they get going, so that all we hear are a series of extended guitar intros, taut basslines and feedback.
Its a brilliant soundtrack for a brilliant film, but as far as I can tell, no soundtrack album exists. While far from exhaustive, here is a selection of some of the music heard in the film, with some brief commentary:

New Order: Dreams Never End
Assayas uses the phenomenal intro from this, the opening track off the album Movement, twice in the film. Its shifts in tone and texture and those rapidly chopped chords clip along like the movie does; at an unforgiving exhilarating pace. Any film that uses early New Order is alright by me.



Feelies: Loveless Love
The horribly underappreciated the Feelies played a much larger role in the plans Assayas originally made for Carlos. He used several of their songs at key points as he cut the film, but when the band were approached they were reluctant to have their music associated with Terrorism in any way. They were finally convinced to give permission to use songs over scenes without any direct connection to Terrorist acts, and Loveless Love, from their excellent debut record, Crazy Rhythms, is used like the New Order song, for the extraordinary fluidity and power of its stripped down intro. He uses another Feelies song, Forces at Work, from the same record, at another point in the film.



Dead Boys: Sonic Reducer
The closest thing to actual punk on the Soundtrack - and a rare period fit, as characters listen to it on the radio at a key point - is this storming rocker, which soundtracks a moment of violent madness and perfectly captures the spirit of the character involved in all her messy, wild abandon. "I got my death machine, Got my electronic dream/ Sonic Reducer/Aint no loser/Sonic Reducer/Aint No Loser."



A Certain Ratio: All Night Party
I love A Certain Ratio in all their fascinating, difficult, unsung glory. I think Assayas does too, and the use of this herky-jerky, creepily off-key treasure from their (largely unavailable, these days) catalogue only proves that.



Wire: Dot Dash
When the Feelies proved reluctant to participate, Assayas more or less replaced them with their not dissimilar British contemporaries, Wire. There are three Wire songs in Carlos - that I noticed, at any rate. "Ahead" is used for its guitar intro and eerie, calm cool, "Drill" for its frenetic rhythm. And "Dot Dash" plays in its entirety. Its perhaps the band's most commercial song, a catchy, bouncy, fun singalong, which might make it sound wrong for a film about a murderous terrorist/assassin. But Assayas makes it work, somehow.


The Lightning Seeds: Pure
Another odd fit, you might say, but Ian Broudie's lovely slice of pop genius is utilized in a rare scene of domestic harmony and happiness, and in that context, it is a terrific choice.


Davy Graham: Jenra
The tonal changes of the third section of the film, mainly set in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, are reflected in the eclecticism which creeps into the soundtrack choices for that portion of the film. Most of them I did not recognise, but this I did. Davy Graham's hypnotic, Morocco-inspired raga becomes more and more hysterical and intense as it progresses, just as the bloated, paranoid Carlos does.

Into the Western

Some creative talent was just made to make Westerns. Walter Hill, say. Tommy Lee Jones. Viggo Mortenson. But they all know it, you can see it in their choice of material. Others aren't quite there yet. Tom Jane. He desperately needs to play a decent cowpoke with a fast draw and a bloody past in a modest modern Western. I feel its his destiny. Michael Madsen. He did it in Blueberry, but nobody saw that, and got close in Kill Bill to playing the shit-eating bad guy he looks and talks like, but not quite close enough for my liking. Javier Bardem, surely born to play a Mexican bandido? He would imbue such a stock figure with depth and humanity. Salma Hayek. As a whore in some border town.

And then theres Marco Beltrami. Hes a soundtrack Composer, responsible for a dozen forgettable Scores for action and genre movies. Remember the Hellboy score? No, me neither. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? Nope, but I'm presuming it ripped off the original theme Bigtime. Live Free or Die Hard? Did that one sound like Michael Kamen's original? I, Robot? Sorry, I'm drawing a complete and utter blank.

But put Beltrami on a Western, and its a different story. Put Beltrami on a Western, and he'll net himself an Oscar nomination.
Maybe its the Morricone factor. Just as some composers seem to feel the need to go all Bernard Hermann whenever they write a score for anything remotely Hitchcockian, many young composers embrace their inner Morricone as soon as men in hats ride by on horses on screen. Out come the surf guitars, the unorthodox choral passages, the eccentric rhythms.
On his score for 3:10 to Yuma, Beltrami is guilty of all this. But he does it all so well. And he writes some great melodies to twist the stylistics around, which is always key. The main theme, a swooningly romantic passage, is lovely and sounds classically Western but also inescapably modern.

This is because Beltrami puts his own stamp on these familiar elements. He modernises where he can - there are synthesisers and samples alongside the electric guitar and orchestra and mandolin. The score sounds like a score for a Western, but could also belong to a modern action film in its propulsive sense of forward momentum, in its constant tension.
Here is the closing theme, the best showcase of that melody:



And this, the very Morricone Bible Study:



3:10 to Yuma is as Classical a Western as Hollywood can make these days, devoted only to telling its story without much in the way of subtext or genre revision in mind, and so the strained romanticism of Beltrami's score is a good fit. His other prominent work on a Western, for Tommy Lee Jones' fantastic The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada is a lot stranger and more experimental, which suits the material. At heart it contains an unmistakeably Western theme, picked out on guitar, but Beltrami surrounds it with strange synth noise, echoes and a jerking percussion which make it thoroughly modern. There are also haunting quivers of what sound like Native American instruments underneath the main melody, which is lovely in itself:



Beltrami seems to be splitting his career cleverly at the moment, working on big genre movies (like the upcoming sci-fi actioner Repo Men and Knowing) and also on projects for quality directors, such as Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist. However, there are no Westerns on his slate at the moment, which is a damn shame.

Novelist George Pelecanos loves Westerns. He refers to them in his books - one of his recurring heroes, PI Derek Strange, is a Western nut and even listens to Soundtrack cds at his desk ( I bet he loves Beltrami) - and writes reviews and articles about them on his website and in online and print media. He wrote a great piece for Sight & Sound a few years back in which he discussed Elmore Leonard adaptations, including a couple of Westerns (he praised the unjustly underloved Valdez Is Coming) and I've read his paeans to Classic Western Novels like Oakley Hall's Warlock and Charles Portis' True Grit. He even contributed this List of 10 Best Westerns to Read for Amazon and this one of his favourite Western movies to the Rumpus. So he knows the genre.

His own books are basically Urban Westerns, in a sense. He tells tales of Men in conflict, of law and order, full of moral quandaries and loyalty and violence and blood, of honour and revenge, and always with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place. He has written several period books - altough only The Big Blowdown is set in a period far removed from his own experience - and recently worked as a writer on HBO's The Pacific, set during WW2. But he needs to write a Western. His crime writing has become somewhat repetitive in its setting, characterisation and concerns, and a change of focus would freshen up his approach, I think. A screenplay would be good, but I really want to see Pelecanos try his hand at an Elmore Leonard-style Western novel; taut, spare and gripping the way Leonard used to do it. Pelecanos is more than capable.

A few years ago I would have said I fervently wanted Quentin Tarantino to direct a Western. Now, post-Kill Bill; not so much. But I would love to see Michael Mann on a western. Or Terence Malick. Carlos Regaydas. Scorsese or Soderbergh. Peter Weir. Many more...