When I look at my watch, at the cinema, there is something wrong. It’s not that I was bored, but I felt like I was running out of air. A quarter of an hour later, I understood that it was not me who lacked air, but the film which lacked breath. From the beginning, the music was there, omnipresent, imposing its rhythm, its variations and its timbres, its strokes of cymbals, drums, its violins… it reigned, perky or oppressive, narrative or expressive, always demonstrative, until to cover and the voices of the actors and the sound of their footsteps. There was no more wind, cars, slamming doors, but music to explain to us that there was wind, cars, slamming doors. As if nothing could exist without her.
It had taken me almost an hour to notice it, but now I only heard her and wanted only one thing: for her to stop. Let the actors speak, the scriptwriters tell the story, the cinematographer light up the night, the filmmaker make his film, finally free himself from the grip of these thundering notes. When the father of the atomic bomb injects cyanide into the Granny Smith intended for his torturer professor but the unexpected and adored visitor seizes the apple, why bury this suspense under the vibratos of a symphony orchestra?
All the relationships between the characters, the state paranoia of the time, the subtle reversal of chronologies, with, in its flashbacks, the reversal of the passages from color to black and white, everything that could have made this Oppenheimer an honest biopic, everything is crushed by this dictatorship, I’m not afraid of words, this melodic dictatorship and the coarseness of the quantum of decibels where all emotion comes from mental manipulation.
It’s in tune with the times, you might say: You can no longer go to a restaurant without suffering their supposedly moral softeners. It is there at the Franprix, at Vuitton as at Uniqlo, in the elevators as on the racetracks, in the stadiums, the stations, the hospitals, in the gardens of Versailles and in the airport toilets. It is the great holocaust of silence. The extermination of the noise of things.
The only force capable of silencing this otherwise uninteresting music, a soup of notes as it occurs in Hollywood by the kilometer, the only weapon which nevertheless comes to the end of this plague, is the atomic bomb. Because after two hours of film concert, it had to be exploded, the A-bomb… and it’s a relief! The musician having exhausted all the effects of the thundering atomic apocalypses, he grants us three marvelous seconds of silence. Before it starts again, for the next hour.
Ludwig Göransson is not Beethoven
If the goal of Christopher Nolan, the director, was to make J. Robert Oppenheimer and his diabolical machine unbearable, if he did indeed ask Ludwig Göransson to ensure that we take no pleasure in watching his film, for fear that the spectator also takes pleasure in seeing the toy being made which was released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the blow is successful, and the film failed.
The origins of this fiasco can be found in the first minute of Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s competitive film about the eponymous doll, which begins with a parody of the first minute of 2001’s Space Odyssey ( Zarathustra by Strauss-Kubrick) where we see little prehistoric girls breaking their baby dolls with primitive hatred before erecting the new, adult doll: Barbie, as a hostess of the quaternary era, as a totem.
If the influence of Stanley Kubrick on Apocalypse Now (Wagner-Coppola’s Valkyrie) was not the happiest, that of Coppola on Nolan is downright disastrous. Or is it simply proof that Ludwig Göransson is not Beethoven?