Everyone knows about the power of music in film. Aaron Copland discusses it briefly in the introduction to What to Listen for in Classical Music, and the proliferation of books dealing with film composers and composition implies an audience ready to take those composers seriously for more than just their notes. Less discussed but insanely effective are the uses of pre-existing classical music in their soundtracks. (I use “insanely” deliberately, because these uses tend to cut past our rational brains and go straight to our non-thinking minds.)
Last year’s There Will Be Blood is a fantastic example, with Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver (a BBC commission) framing the film’s opening, but so, and in a different way entirely, is the recent A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Nöel), directed by Arnaud Desplechin. Beyond Greenwood’s piece, director Paul Thomas Anderson uses the opening of the final movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in two key places. The first is when Daniel Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview first strikes oil, and the second is after he beats Paul Dano’s Eli Sunday to death in the bowling alley in his mansion. The jubilant D-major crowing of the violin signifies the exultation and the striving that Plainview has been after as he ruthlessly pursues his goals. It also cements Plainview’s malevolence in the eyes of the viewer, as the major key is abrupt and jarring, and not what one expects following a brutal clubbing:
To make the point even better and appease the Larry David fans out there, consider this version:
But what sets the use of the Brahms apart from the example I’m getting ready to describe in Desplechin’s film is that it’s on the soundtrack; the characters don’t hear it, and can’t hear it. Scholars call this “non-diegetic” music, because it isn’t actually part of the narrative space, making “diegetic” music that is in the visual frame of the film. (A great example of diegetic music is Peter Bogdanovich’s The Cat’s Meow (2001, with Kirsten Dunst and Eddie Izzard, where all the music comes from a radio or a bandstand.)
To set the scene for A Christmas Tale, a little exposition is needed. Junon (Catherine Deneuve) is matriarch of a family of four children, and the fifth died when he was 6. She has been diagnosed with a blood disease that will take her life if she does not have a bone-marrow transplant, but the transplant’s success is not guaranteed, and the complications from that could also lead to her death. The oldest child Elizabeth, a successful daughter who’s a playwright (Anne Consigny), does not speak to her younger brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric), whose life has been either a holding pattern or a downward spiral. After each of the children and three grandchildren have been tested to see if they’re compatible with Junon’s blood type, it is discovered that only Henri and the daughter’s son Paull (the bracing Emile Berling) are suitable bone-marrow donors.The daughter advises against using Henri, but Junon worries about subjecting Paull, who is mentally troubled, to the trials of surgery and recovery. Junon is further concerned by what may happen to Paull if his donated bone marrow is rejected by her immune system and ends up killing her. (We see him apologize to his mother earlier for “failing at everything.”)
All of this goes around and around, sad and funny by turns, and finally Henri accepts his duty to donate to save his mother’s life. It’s Christmastime in the family’s house, and we hear Bach’s Ich ruf’zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ coming from a piano, either in Ferruccio Busoni’s or Wilhelm Kempff’s transcription. It turns out that Henri is seated at an upright piano. He pauses after a few measures, jokes about how excited he is, then plays a few more before breaking off entirely. As he plays, however, Desplechin enters into a montage of images from the family’s life, ending with a shot of the 6-year old older brother’s gravestone. Incidentally, Bach and Ich ruf’zu dir are nowhere to be found in the film’s credits.
Desplechin uses a wide variety of music in the film, from Vivaldi to Joe Henderson and Duke Ellington (under the broad heading of jazz) to French hip-hop, and since we see Junon’s husband poring over a Thelonius Monk lead sheet, we can conclude that he takes the music track seriously. Another important scene plays out as the youngest brother DJs a large party. (A.O. Scott alludes to this in his NYT review.) What makes Henri playing that Bach(/Busoni/Kempff) piece at that point is its letting go, its handing off of his own will and desire and placing it in God’s hands.
And yet, Bach knew at that time what Desplechin knows today, and what his characters know as they fight against it: Letting go is difficult, and painful, and involves sacrifice. Bach’s prelude works its way through F minor for most of its length, and unlike Brahms’s heroic D major, only gets to a culminating major on its very last chord, and does so pianissimo.