SBS Film Focus: Music

“Music,” the great composer Ludwig van Beethoven once said, “is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” Although he wasn’t around to see what Stanley Kubrick did with his 9th Symphony as a sonic backdrop in 1971’s A Clockwork Orange (hint: it’s unconventional), the words from the Viennese master of the early 19th century have come to hold a truth in regard to the cinema. The picture considered by many the first “talkie”, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, starred one of America’s most popular vocalists, Al Jolson, and with the advent of recorded sound (as opposed to live accompaniment) music has become ever more important to film.

The first and most obvious way is with the musical, once a great part of cinema’s aim to entertain, and now once more an element that can dazzle and surprise in the hands of the right filmmaker. But beyond that is the draw of music as a means of expression: nothing can break the silent tension of the silver screen like a character bursting into song. It speaks to inner passion and belief; music is at once a means of escape and a search for truth.

The way we relate to music, the manner in which it brightens our souls whether we mean for it too or not, is the subject of a forthcoming season of films in December on SBS. The four titles screen on consecutive Tuesdays at 9.30pm – C.R.A.Z.Y. on December 6, Camarón: When Flamenco Became Legend on December 13, Orchestra Seats on December 20 and Les Choristes on December 27 – and between them they illuminate that interweaving of the spiritual and the sensual, with a few unexpected stops in between.

In Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. the French Canadian filmmaker, who went on to make 2009’s The Young Victoria, uses music as a kind of key to unlock the dynamics of a dysfunctional household. In the Beaulieu family Gervais (Michael Cote) and Laurianne (Danielle Proulx) have five sons and the one that the patriarch rages against is not the trouble-prone Raymond (Pierre-Luc Brillant), who is indulged despite his attraction to narcotics, but his younger brother, Zach (Marc-Andre Grondin). The boy’s perceived crime, in a movie set in the Quebec province of the 1960s and 1970s, is a lack of masculinity.

Zach’s struggle with his father, and ultimately his own sexuality, is documented by a wondrous (and undoubtedly expensive) selection of period tunes. Pink Floyd, David Bowie (the astral fear of ‘Space Oddity’) and Charles Aznavour set a varied, contemplative tone, while Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ is tied to proceedings: it is one of Gervais’ favourite songs, and throughout the 2005 film, which avoids the clichés of so many coming of age tales, Zach searches for a copy to replace the one he broke as a child. Music, on many levels, is a salve in C.R.A.Z.Y.

2005’s Camaron: When Flamenco Became Legend is a biopic of Spanish flamenco singer Jose Monje Cruz, who performed as Camaron de la Isla and is credited by many aficionados as the singer who revolutionised flamenco music and popularised it for a modern audience. Cruz died at the age of 42 due to cancer in 1992, and 100,000 people attended his funeral in Barcelona, testament to both his popularity and the ravages he’d endured, and the movie was made in consultation with his former teenage bride and widow, Dolores Montoya (played in the picture by Veronica Sanchez).

Jaime Chávarri’s film hews to the same parameters as many other biopics about musicians: the uneasy connection between unhindered creativity and personal indulgence, the responsibility of talent and how that becomes warped, the strange, erosive qualities that come with success; it’s the same personal milieu that flows through Clint Eastwood’s Bird or Taylor Hackford’s Ray. Oscar Jaenada plays Camaron as a man trying to embody a powerful, impassioned music, and the numerous original recordings used in the film make clear what a fascinating sound and terrific burden that was.

Music is just one of the arts featured in Orchestra Seats (pictured). In Daniele Thompson’s 2006 movie – her third after a long career writing with her father, French comedy director Gerard Oury, which stretched back to the 1960s – a group of creative souls struggling with their endeavours are linked together by a Parisian brasserie and a young waitress without affectation (Cecile De France) who provides a contemplative reflection to their complex lives. There is an actor wanting an unexpected new role, an art collector ready to sell his most loved possessions, and a concert pianist, Jean-Francois Lefort (Albert Dupontel), grown tired of his career.

Thompson passed the latter on her friend, Francois-Rene Duchable, who a decade ago gave away the concert circuit. Dupontel plays the role with wary unease, grinding against the movie’s blithe bonhomie. His character is a gifted musician whose talent has changed his circumstances – he still loves music, but the rituals and expectations that come with it, from the hermetic existence to the starchy audience, rob him of any pleasure. At the instigation of his wife and manager, Valentine (Laura Morante), music has gone from setting him free to becoming his gaoler. It is the most satisfying of Orchestra Seats’ three convergent strands.

Music has great redemptive power; that which can not be expressed through speech can always be sung, and that’s the underpinning for Christophe Barratier’s Les Choristes. In the 2006 French film a successful conductor (Jacques Perrin) and a childhood friend are reunited by reading the diary of their first music teacher, Clement Mathieu (Gerard Jugnot), who came to their institutional home for boys and slowly won over the young troublemakers and orphans by instituting a choir.

The film is set in 1949, and it could have been made then, too. This is a conventional, but deeply held, endeavour where the emotional notes are hit with care until they combine to create an uplifting chorus. Music changes lives for the better in Les Choristes, and there’s something to be said for the contrast in hearing these young voices sing together and the sometimes trying circumstances in which they live. Of course, that’s only one way that music adds to the cinema, and there are many more that inform the screen beyond the small representation of this season. As Al Jolson promises in The Jazz Singer, “You ain’t heard nothing yet!”

SBS TWO MUSIC FILM FOCUS SCHEDULE

Tuesday 6 December, 9:30pm
C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
Director: Jean-Marc Vallée
Starring: Marc-Andre Grondin, Michael Cote, Danielle Proulx

Tuesday 13 December, 9:30pm
Camarón: When Flamenco Became Legend (2005)
Dir: Jaime Chávarri
Cast: Óscar Jaenada, Veronica Sanchez, Mercè Llorens

Tuesday 20 December, 9:30pm
Orchestra Seats (2006)
Dir: Danièle Thompson
Cast: Valérie Lemercier, Cécile De France, Albert Dupontel

Tuesday 27 December, 9:30pm
Les Choristes (2004)
Dir: Christophe Barratier
Cast: Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand, Kad Merad