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Morricone's soundtrack resonates in Venice

 Ennio Morricone,Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore

One of the most awaited films this year at the Venice Film Festival 1-11 September, is the documentary made by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore about the late great musician, Ennio Morricone, which he called his first name "ennio". The film is approximately three hours long, and it can be said that watching it is a pure pleasure for the ear and the eye at the same time. This view was able to instill in us the joy that many realistic films that convey the tragedies of the world refrain from. Here, Tornatore plunges us into everything that makes up the Morricone world, who has never bowed down to anything other than music, and has devoted his life to nothing else. He was a kind of musician who gave his life to it. And our joy comes not only from hearing with great pleasure his music, but from realizing that we have lived through one of the great artists of the twentieth century, whose works remind us of Nietzsche's saying that "life without music is a mistake."

"Anio" is not an ordinary documentary, but rather it is a creative type, that is, it includes a cinematic language. It is not satisfied with recording interviews and including some movie scenes among them. The respect of the director of Cinema Paradiso and his love for Morricone is very great, and I think that this film would not have come to light in this way, had it not been for this love and respect that are at the heart of the film, with mentioning that Tornatore and Morricone worked on several films and the links between them exceeded those of work.

In the film, dozens of valuable testimonies from people who worked with Morricone, experienced him, or studied his work well. Among them, Bernardo Bertolucci, Nicola Biovanni, Clint Eastwood, Dario Argento, Hans Zimmer, The Taviani Brothers, Bruce Springsteen, Quentin Tarantino and many others are too numerous to mention here. Musicians, actors, directors, all of these could say something about the talent of an exceptional man, sometimes with short but meaningful words, at other times with endearing eloquence. However, the film is not limited to testimonies, even if they are important. Rather, he introduces us to Morricone through a long meeting Tornatore had with him before his departure, of course. Through this interview, we really discover the true eightie man, away from the image that was painted in our minds through his music.

The film starts from his childhood when he played the wind instrument for Americans in bars in exchange for food, and then crosses all the stages of his musical personality growth, all the way to the works he presented, his cooperation with major filmmakers in Italy and the world. It concludes with the glory he reaped during his massive musical tours that took him all over the world. The presence of such an aspect is normal in any documentary that tells the biography of a particular character. But, on the other hand, what is rare is the frank language in which he speaks to the camera as if sitting alone with Tornatore. What a shock to us when we learn that he does not like some of his tunes that we adore, and that he has suffered throughout his life from an inferiority complex towards musicians who have always considered composing music for films as unrelated to musical art. Starting with his mentor and role model, Goffredo Petrasse, who viewed the soundtrack as something of a pariah. Morricone suffered from such an unfair, limited, narrow, and reactionary view of his work that he himself believed it was correct, before he overcame it. At the end of the movie he admits he was wrong.

The film is very complex, and it is useless to try to address its details. We are talking here about more than 60 years of soundtrack history, and about 500 films that Morricone decorated with his tunes. However, Tornatore does not skimp on the viewer with a lot of details and information. He is determined not to make a film that is purely festive (though it will become festive at the last minute), and the only way to avoid this superficiality is to pause behind the scenes in the composition of the music for the dozens of films that are milestones in Morricone's record, revealing his artistic evolution and the new directions in which he has gone through time . Morricone's comments are touching and very important, as they illuminate many aspects that deserve to be studied, and tell the details of his cooperation with filmmakers, his discussions and disagreements with them. We know, for example, and among the dozens of facts that the film overflows, that the man composed many hit songs in his beginnings before joining the cinema, and he specialized at a stage in the low-key “western” films before Sergio Leone gave him the opportunity to unleash his rare imagination in the field of musical composition. , through the "Triple Dollar". He also hated the use of films for ready-made music, when it seemed to me that his biggest professional obsession was not to repeat himself, trying to constantly renew.

The film also delays the issue of the Oscar, which he won once (the day Tarantino resorted to composing the music for his movie “The Hateful Eight”) and lost it six times, knowing that Hollywood had honored him with an honorary “Oscar” as a kind of apology to him. By addressing the issue of the "Oscar", Tornatori wanted to talk about a long overdue re-accreditation from the cinematic community in Morricone's case.

We are used to following the scenes of filming films and optical illusions, but hearing a music composer, who is the most revolutionary of them, talk about unknown sources of revelation to the wide audience, this is something Tornatore would be grateful for, especially since the explanation comes from the mouth of the maestro who astonishes us with his ability to remember things that happened decades ago in their minute details. No, it gives life to the film when some melodies hum with great enthusiasm as if they are being born now at this moment. A sensitive man who talks to us with a tear stuck in his eye always and forever.

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