(Warning! Here be spoilers!)
The always hilarious Playlist Blog recently titled one of its posts: "21 Film Delivers Dance-Heavy Soundtrack So You Can Marginally Stomach This Cliched Gambling Flick." This headline nails a particular big budget phenomenon where the soundtrack is falling all over itself to be stylish but used only perfunctorily in the film...a general cue to the audience to regard the thing as hip. There's some Rhianna. There's some Kasabian. Probably the Rolling Stones track is the one most prominently featured, because hey, the filmmakers paid out the nose for it, so by God they're going to use it for the opening credits, the trailer, and every other moment that needs filling. Never mind that it's been done about a squillion times before.
The opposite kind of soundtrack the kind that Gus Van Sant has crafted for his masterful film, Paranoid Park, about a young skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard. Van Sant thinks way, waaaaay outside the box on this one, including everything from experimental electronic to old Nino Rota scores, and everything in between...classical, punk, indie rock, hip hop, ragtime, all used in highly original and unexpected ways.
If it sounds schizophrenic, it's not. In fact, few directors are as comfortable with music as Van Sant. He not only lets it have a real presence in his films, he knows how to wield it artistically, using music to shape moments rather than pander to them. There's the quietly glitchy music, for instance, he uses for the viewer's first glimpse of the skateboarding grounds. It's a scene for which many directors would have chosen thrash metal or something equally testosterone-driven, but with Van Sant you instead get dreamy little bleeps and bloops under some hushed French phrases.
Van Sant also lets music spool out for far longer than most directors do, like the scene in which he plays nearly all of "The White Lady Loves You More" by his longtime favorite Elliot Smith (whom he absolutely has a right to keep using in his soundtracks since he was the very first director to do so in Good Will Hunting). The song accompanies a shot of skater kids leaving their classrooms to walk down a high school hallway, but the scene and the song play out for much longer than you expect; Van Sant is working directly against our cultural case of ADD and the effect is weirdly exhilarating, like watching how long someone can hold their hand over an open flame.
Genius moments like this happen all throughout Paranoid Park, but there's one in particular that stands out and it happens during the film's most charged sequences, just after Alex accidentally kills the guard. It's a very simple yet incredibly memorable scene in which he's standing in the shower, head lowered, with long, icicle-like water forms extending downward from his hair. The music is "Walk Through [Resonant Landscape] No. 2" by avant-gard artist Frances White, and it's difficult to explain how powerfully sound and image come together in this scene. The music features a simple electronic tone paired with rainfall and birdsong, but as it plays out in the film it's like watching some sort of exotic, possibly poisonous flower bloom in real time; the moment just keeps getting bigger, fuller, and more loaded with each passing second.
Van Sant even lets music eclipse the dialog at times, as he does in one particular scene in which Alex, the protagonist, is breaking up with his girlfriend, Jennifer. By then, you've already learned what Jennifer's overriding concerns in life are, so there's no real need to hear her actual words at that point. Instead Van Sant plays a bit of score from Juliet of the Spirits over top the whole conversation, keeping the camera squarely on her face throughout. You can't hear what she's saying, but her expressions tell you everything you need to know.
Above and beyond music, the overall sound design is crazy good in Paranoid Park. Little details make certain scenes indelible, like the ambient hoots and hollers of people having poolside fun just outside the window of the room where Jennifer and Alex are having sex for the first time. Paranoid Park looks absolutely beautiful too--rightly described as "aesthetically intoxicating" by IFC--thanks to cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li. There is no one thing that defines the look of the film; like the soundtrack, it has hybrid vigor, traveling from pleasantly grainy super 8 to crystal clear 35mm sequences, from bleached out beach scenes to shadowy bedrooms. Your eye is constantly engaged, even in the most banal moments like when Alex leans out the car window to order some fast food, and a bright white line appears on the right side of the frame..perhaps a reflection off the car window. It's the kind of thing other filmmakers would have edited out or re-shot, but Van Sant and Doyle let that line become a visual element in its own right.
The film closes out with a memorable track called "Outlaw" by a guy named Cast King who put out his first album at the age of 79. It was recorded at King's house in Old Sand Mountain, Alabama, with only a four-track tape and MiniDisc recorder present. It's intimate and mournful and once again, some of the very last music you'd expect to be paired with skateboarding footage. For this moment and all the others, we say thanks Gus Van Sant for keeping us on our toes and making something truly original in Paranoid Park. It's one of the best films we've seen this year.
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