In order to give emotional heft to a lot of
theoretically humorous stereotypes about the Japanese, Sofia Coppola and
company chose to use the ambiances created by various contemporary pop
musicians, primarily those of Kevin Shields, the former My Bloody Valentine
guitarist, as well as a return appearance (following their work for
Coppola's The Virgin Suicides) by the French duo Air. Also included in the mix are sundry
evanescent bits from the Jesus and Mary Chain, Death in Vegas,
Squarepusher, Phoenix, Happy End, and '70s-retro specialists Brian Reitzell
& Roger J. Manning Jr.
You hear loads of talk these
days about the fantastic musical selections that directors are assembling
to throw into their films. Then you grab a copy of the soundtrack album
itself, and you probably say, yeah, this must be one radical film, what
with all these superstrong sounds driving the images along. But then you
see the film, and of course it's, hey wait a sec, what happened to all
those trendy tunes I was supposed to be hearing? Lost in translation.
Coppola's movie is pretty typical in this regard, though maybe she had to
agree to a pop-packed score in order to get the film made, the deal
including a soundtrack album that would both pique interest and be counted
a commercially hot item on its own...Nah, no doubt she's just another one of
the many young directors who claim music and not visual art or literature
as their chief influence.
Pretty typical too is how Lost in
Translation
uses this great new music only in the barest fleeting snatches. In this
case, the movie is far better off for its minimal musical elements, since
the timbre of the story ÐÐ a low-key, pensive and surprisingly old-fashioned
tale of two mismatched visitors to Japan who engage in a brief relationship
that has no place to go ÐÐ requires a lot of sighing space that could only
work with muted or vaporous tones. That sort of milieu is one of Air's
trademarks, and their track here accompanying a young woman's visit to the
quieter temple-strewn world of Kyoto is a delicate, dusky touch that
flashes back to the group's elegantly wistful Moon Safari album.
Shields' original score
of incidental music makes use of mostly very simple, plangent
electric-keyboard chord progressions, but better yet, then takes the
raging, distorted guitars of My Bloody Valentine and compresses them, an
approach that effectively conveys (well, amplifies) the squashed rage and
lust of the two protagonists. Your de rigueur frenzied nightclub-scene
music, in extremely short snippets (and in strange contrast to the cast's
several karaoke versions of kitschy pop standards, performed in their
entirety),
comes from the likes of electronic agitators such as Death in Vegas and
Squarepusher ÐÐ a rather superficial use of dance or drum & bass music's
quite literal agitations. Yet, all things considered, the score must be
reckoned a triumph, because Coppola has succeeded in using film music that
almost completely disappears before you realize it'd ever been there at
all.
