A Very Long Engagement [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

Employing the stunning, kinetic visual sense that made his reputation via Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and Amelie, French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet turned Sebastien Japrisot's compelling World War I novel into the biggest budgeted film ever produced in his home country. To musically season his often downbeat epic, Jeunet again utilizes Lost Children's composer, Angelo Badalamenti, and the American rises to the occasion with a brooding score that evokes dignified melancholy at every turn. While its shadowy introspection and brief passages of electronica only distantly recall Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and his other collaborations with David Lynch, his work here is utterly devoid of their often pop-ironic kitsch. Instead, writing in the powerful, modernist milieu of Herrmann and Howard Shore, Badalamenti's score turns repeatedly on a brief, mournful phrase for muted brass, a five-note motif that serves as the emotional anchor for one of the composer's most elegant exercises in orchestral understatement. -- Jerry McCulley