CD Reviews: In the Mood for Love and Taboo/Gohatto

In the Mood for Love ****

MICHAEL GALASSO

Rock ROD5223 (Asian release)

25 tracks - 47:12

Wong Kar-wei, the renegade auteur Hong Kong director, made many underground, low-budget movies before he was embraced by the world cinema community after winning the best director's prize at Cannes for Happy Together. He's been compared to Quentin Tarentino and Oliver Stone, and this is certainly warranted as far as his choices of music. He employs many styles of music (remember Stone's use of Patsy Cline next to Nine Inch Nails in Natural Born Killers?). Wong can get so caught up in a piece a music that if you see one of his films, you'll either run to the store to get a copy of the album, or your head will explode if you ever hear the song again. This was the case with The Mamas and The Papa's "California Dreaming" in Chungking Express. In the Mood for Love also indulges in this excess, but this time, I started to see the genius behind the repetition.

In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wei's latest drama, is all mood and little story. The movie takes place in 1960s Hong Kong where two neighbors discover that their respective spouses are having an affair. The "victims" confront this infidelity together, consoling each other and ultimately falling in love themselves. The film focuses on images and costuming and camera work more than the actual story, and it's a wonder that actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai won the Best Actor award in Cannes last year. I still recommend this for anyone who loves films and film making.

While the soundtrack uses many source cues to evoke any particular mood, none are used more effectively and as frequently than "Yumeji's Theme," which is lifted from Japanese director Suzuki Seijun's 1991 film Yumeji. A waltz played predominantly by strings, this theme is used over and over again as the two unloved spouses try to fill each nights (mostly by going up and down stairs to a noodle shop near their apartment house). Again and again we are treated to the monotony of their nights, as they sometimes pass each other on the stairs...and sometimes not.

The album also features a trio of Nat King Cole songs sung in Spanish, including a humorous take on "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." Supposedly very popular on Hong Kong radio in the '60s, these songs are usually played along side Chinese source cues from opera and other historic recording. This gives the soundtrack a menagerie of different moods.

Like such auteur directors as Kubrick and Tarantino (who are so specific with their images and sounds) Wong seems to not need a composer at all. However, he did hire American Michael Galasso, a theater and dance composer to contribute incidental music, including underscore for the haunting and touching denouement. Galasso's pieces, mostly dominated by violin and cello, fit well alongside "Yumeji's Theme."

I am not usually one to recommend a CD that is so dominated by source cues and pop songs. But once you see this movie, you will appreciate the CD a lot more, especially since most of the cues are obscure and otherwise unavailable in any form.

Special note for collectors: There are three different releases of this soundtrack; Rock released the Asian version; Virgin released the European version; and Higher Octave (72438-505422-8, 21 tracks - 48:12) released the US version. Also, look out for a limited edition, special packaging of the CD for the Asian release which includes postcards from the movie as well as different cue listings. There is also a second volume of music being released by Virgin in France called More in the Mood for Love.  -- Cary Wong
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Taboo/Gohatto *** 1/2

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO

Milan International 35928

21 tracks - 64: 59

Taboo/Gohatto is the first theatrical film in 14 years directed by Oshima Nagisa, the aging enfant terrible of Japanese cinema. The movie has an excellent cast, including Beat Takeshi, the Korean-Japanese director Sai Yoichi and Taguchi Tomoro, (Tetsuo) and is beautifully filmed by Kurita Toyomichi with location shots in ancient temples and streets of Kyoto. Its rather incoherent plot, set in late 19th-century Japan, involves a teenage recruit to the pro-shogunate terrorist band, Shinsengumi, whose unnerving beauty eventually drives other band-members mad with lust and jealousy. This film will no doubt be tough on American viewers; it has many references to classical Japanese literature; on-again off-again voice-over narrations and title cards; and a head-scratching ending that has Beat Takeshi chopping a cherry blossom tree. Like all of Oshima's works made after the notorious In the Realm of the Senses, (1976) Taboo is more of a self-addressed statement of artistic integrity than a motion picture.

One of the more successful elements of the film is Ryuichi Sakamoto's techno-ethnic score. Sakamoto previously collaborated with Oshima on Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), a breakthrough project for Sakamoto's film-composing and acting career. Compared to Merry Christmas, which was much influenced by Sakamoto's post-Orientalist, early-techno brand of pop music (exemplified in the output of Yellow Magic Orchestra), the score for Taboo is almost completely stripped of contemporary pop references. It's austere, and not surprisingly given his current orientation as a composer (as heard, for instance, in his recent hit BTTB, "Back to the Basics").

Taboo's central theme bears resemblance to the catchy tune from Merry Christmas, but is darker, more ethereal and more tragic. The theme is given full-fledged renditions in the main and end titles. Bracketing them is mostly ambient electronic music with ethnic flavor. Tracks such as "Affair" and "Murder" combine ominously echoing percussion, crashing piano and various distorted electronic samples in order to illustrate frantic fight scenes and dramatic confrontations. Most of the ethnic instruments used in the score sound completely non-Japanese. (Gamelans seem to be featured prominently in cues including "Persuasion.")

Having seen the film in a theater, I was impressed with the way this slightly off-kilter music was able to endow potentially laughable or archly pretentious scenes with a quiet sense of dread and mystery. A good analogy would be what Howard Shore's metallic, almost dehumanizing score achieved for the star-studded film adaptation of Crash, which, with wrong kind of music, might have degenerated into kitsch. Taboo is precisely the type of artsy film that would have been ruined by a well-meaning, melodically rich symphonic score. Sakamoto's score will be decidedly off-putting for some film music fans, but is otherwise a significant contribution to the overall strength of the film.   -- Kyu Hyun Kim
 

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