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Review of Lust, Caution (Alexandre Desplat)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if you consistently appreciate Alexandre Desplat's ability to accentuate the tasteful drama in a film without taking any chances in terms of the depth of his emotional reach.

Avoid it... if the lack of true passion, suspicion, romance, and danger in this music makes it too safely inoffensive to engage you as thoroughly as you expect for a film of this melodramatic agony.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Lust, Caution: (Alexandre Desplat) Director Ang Lee certainly has no qualms about depicting graphic sexual situations in the context of challenging dramas, and Lust, Caution was his 2007 follow-up in this regard to his controversial but acclaimed Brokeback Mountain. The phenomenally depressing story of Lust, Caution tells of a resistance cell of Hong Kong students that attempts to undermine the Chinese puppet government agents supported by the Japanese occupation of the late 1930's and early 1940's. The main protagonist is a young woman enlisted to be part of the resistance after meeting like-minded youths in a university drama club. It takes several years and a shift to Shanghai to finally lure her target, a high-ranking government recruiter and secret police head, into a vulnerable position. Her necessitated relationship with the target causes her to become emotionally attached to him, however, leading to the failure of the assassination attempt at the last minute. Needless to say, the good-guys don't fare well in Lust, Caution. While the film was praised widely and received significant awards consideration, it was blacklisted for its extreme depictions of sex acts, none of which Lee wished to censor himself to achieve a wider release. There are lingering reports that some of the sex on screen was not simulating, complicating matters. Nevertheless, Lust, Caution was the type of film in desperate need of a quietly passionate, melodramatic score, and although Lee's most lasting composer collaboration in the 2000's was actually with Danny Elfman, and despite his previously successful partnership with Patrick Doyle, he made the safe choice of enlisting the help of rising star Alexandre Desplat for the picture. The French composer was just reaching the plateau of critical popularity that carried him to significant acclaim throughout the latter half of the 2000's. His well-received music for The Painted Veil had just recently proven that he could tackle a dramatic topic set in China without utilizing a dominant regional tone in his music, and he once again takes that approach for Lust, Caution.

While Desplat has been known in the years since then to fill his scores with frenzies of activity, often exploring two or three lines of musical action simultaneously, this score is closer to an emulation of John Barry's more restrained dramatic style of the 1990's. The temperament of Lust, Caution's score is extremely restrained and subtle, forgoing any really deep expressions of passion to underline the strained suspense and societal mores in play. That technique won the hearts of Deplat's growing following amongst film music critics (many of whom listed this as one of the five best overall efforts of 2007, joining Desplat's concurrent The Golden Compass), but a lack of genuine passion ultimately makes Lust, Caution one of the most overrated scores of the entire decade. There is no doubt that Desplat's musical constructs and their evolution through Lust, Caution are intelligently conceived. The application of waltzes reminiscent of The Luzhin Defence represents higher culture and the target's wife; aside from the two specific "Dinner Waltz" tracks, the concluding "An Empty Bed" is a frightfully effective return to that mode. The younger woman receives a melancholy theme anchored by three notes in an elegant minor mode to suggest a love triangle. Heard first in "Falling Rain," this idea culminates in its only ensemble performance in "The Angel" at the pivotal moment in the film. The suite rendition of this idea ("Wong Chia Chi's Theme") is a highlight. The slow death of the melody in "The South Quarry" and "An Empty Bed" is quite compelling. The students turned resistance fighters start innocuously with a playful idea early in the film as well, occupying "Playacting" and "Tsim Sha Tsui Stroll" with brighter similarities to Desplat's usual dramatic tendencies. In the mid-section of the score, the secondary phrases of the main theme for the woman evolve into an identity for Shanghai and her target, yielding some of the sequences that will remind listeners of Barry's tepid side in the drama genre, especially in "The Secret." Solo performances of this secondary theme by violin or electric cello exist in "Remember Everything" and "Seduction," sometimes punctuated by chopping bass string rhythms of accelerated, aggressive intent.

Whereas the thematic elements described above are the clear upside of Desplat's work for Lust, Caution on the whole, the instrumental depth and performance aspects of the score are its downfall. The ensemble consists of strings and piano for most of its length, plucked and tapped accents from percussion more common than rare brass accompaniment meant simply to beef up the sound for the suite track. Desplat layers his instrumental lines well, sometimes barely plucking the three primary notes from the main theme in the background of other activity. But never in the score do you feel a genuine sense of passion, suspicion, romance, danger, or any other heightened emotion. The composer is so careful to keep his tone tastefully restrained that he ends up producing sonic wallpaper in many parts. Gain levels are so low throughout the album presentation (an odd circumstance given that damn near everything these days is pressed to maximum tolerances to artificially boost importance in the music) that long parts may pass by at a barely audible threshold. Even the slightly dissonant passages that open and close the album are handled with gloves and at a distance, almost as if to barely suggest trouble but not actually extend that idea to any substantial degree. Some of those who have not jumped on the Desplat bandwagon after his first decade of major international recognition have claimed that he is a master of writing safely inoffensive music, never one to take significant stylistic chances for any assignment. In many ways, Lust, Caution is one of the best pieces of evidence supporting this theory, proving the composer's ability to create the right sound for the right picture but not able to add that additional level of emotional attachment for the listener to take the score to the next level. It's a competent score and a mostly effortless listening experience, but you can't help but get the impression that an extra dose of passion (if only even in the conductor's directions during the performances) could have truly fulfilled the potential inherent in this composition. The album features the seamless inclusion of one classical source piece and for some reason shifts two of the score's interior pieces (rejected cues?) to "bonus tracks" at the end of the product. Expect a fine, solid three-star album with two or three highlights fighting to transcend the cloudy, depressing haze of the score's entirety.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 59:54

• 1. Lust, Caution (1:08) • 2. Dinner Waltz (1:53) • 3. Falling Rain (1:14) • 4. Intermezzo in A Major, Op.118 No 2* (6:12) • 5. Streets of Shanghai (3:02) • 6. Playacting (2:45) • 7. Tsim Sha Tsui Stroll (1:45) • 8. Exodus (1:37) • 9. Moonlight Drive (3:06) • 10. Shanghai 1942 (2:30) • 11. The End of Innocence (2:31) • 12. Sacrifice (4:19)

• 13. Remember Everything (2:12) • 14. Check Point (1:05) • 15. The Secret (1:34) • 16. Nanking Road (3:07) • 17. On the Street (1:37) • 18. The Angel (2:21) • 19. The South Quarry (2:17) • 20. An Empty Bed (1:57) • 21. Dinner Waltz - performed by Traffic Quintet (2:00) • 22. Wong Chia Chi's Theme (3:45) • 23. Seduction (1:41) • 24. Desire (4:27)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes a list of performers, but no extra information about the score or film.

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