Debate | Issue 5 | Music

The Best Use of Music in … By Nam Woon Kim (he/him) Spoilers for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Double Life of Véronique

Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Vivaldi’s Summer Presto I love classical music and I love a classical music needle drop. But unless it leaves me holding my breath for three minutes like at the end of Portrait of Lady on Fire, do I really wanna hear it? Director Céline Sciamma and actress Adèle Haenel raised the bar on how to use music with this final scene which features our titular lady on fire listening to a performance of Vivaldi’s 'Summer'.

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The Double Life of Véronique, Van den Budenmayer’s Concerto en mi mineur

This piece is foreshadowed earlier in the story where the main character Marianne plays some of the opening notes for Héloïse on harpsichord as their relationship begins to take shape. This tease sat in my head for the rest of the movie and the gut feeling that it’d be paid off was rewarded by the ending epilogue. Marianne settles down in a concert theatre and notices Héloïse across the room. The audience quietens down and the same notes she tentatively bashed through decades earlier come to life in a full string ensemble with every memory flooding back too.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s melancholic

The recording they went with was an excellent choice; it’s not unusual for classical music to have hundreds of different recordings to choose from. Performed by an ensemble led by Adrian Chandler, the intensity, the tempo, the dynamic control, everything about it fits what was needed by Sciamma and co. to make this scene hit.

The film’s characteristic green and yellow

Relationships that ‘could have been’ are timeless in cinema and few have done it better than here thanks to a devastating use of music.

turns her soprano lines into a scream. The

portrait of two women identical to each other living on opposite sides of Europe features an unexpectedly raw and haunting musical performance early on. Composed for this scene by Zbigniew Preisner, we witness the death of one of our two protagonists while she performs this fictional opera to a packed theatre. Weronika’s story revolves around her musical career and a successful chance audition leads to this scene that lesser filmmakers would save for later in the movie.

tones become foreboding while paired with this song but the atmosphere is no less dreamy. What makes this scene even more uncanny is the stylistic decision to cut between the performance and Weronika’s first person perspective. As the song picks up, our unease is validated as Weronika clutches her heart while singing, which rest of the choir and orchestra join in with Weronika pressing on before the camera collapses to the ground. Fade to black.