"Somewhere, Someone"

by Rémy Grauwin

 

 

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I SYNOPSIS

Paris, fragments of lives: the lives of Raphaële, architect and humanist; Vincent, her friend, a journalist who writes and drinks; Emmanuel, an ethnology student who refuses the roles imposed upon him; the life of a woman from the provinces, lost in her Parisian solitude; and the lives of Albert and Germaine, a couple enjoying a happy old age until their expropriation, which condemns their future. Urban fragments. Fragments of the crowd.

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A tracking shot across Parisian walls. Façades flitting across the lens of the camera. Murmurings come to life, sliding, spreading and cutting across each other in strange, indistinct vocal particles in suspension.

And then suddenly, an interior scene, a gust of sound from which a mixed chorus springs, propelled by abrasive glissandi from dashing, grainy strings. A cluster of sensations, a camera in motion, montage alternating interior/exterior, snatches of individuals, a proliferating crowd, singularities and multitudes. The orchestra exhales: tremolos, the raucous call of a trumpet, the ghost of a harpsichord, slicing traits from the violas and the Ondes Martenot agglomerate in a halo of sound, strangely disturbing.

 

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I SPECTRAL WRITING

Right from the outset, the music of Georges Delerue for Somewhere, Someone frees itself from the outward aspects of musical narrative in films. "After seeing the film, I immediately felt that the music shouldn't be treated in the same way as the music for a classical film. Something in a pure state was needed: perfectly abstract music." The style of composition here doesn't proceed in phases of narration, recitation, description, or the frequent use of themes. The writing is pure sound: acoustical, emotional and impulsive, it is expressed in blocks of sensations, speeds, textures, peaks, densities and flux. The music is close to the spectral aesthetic and the prevalence given to the intensely close expressiveness of the timbre and harmony, and to the emancipation of the sound.

 

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I MUSICAL PRISM 

Throughout the story, the music functions like a prism, concentrating, crossing and refracting the biographical beams of the film's characters, the rhythms and turbulence of the city, the heartbeats of beings and things, the laws of desire and land registry, the bringing together of people and their separation, the joys of sharing and the throes of solitude. This prism of sound absorbs, bends and diffuses in dazzling flashes or in latent periods, with the effects of intensity, instability, interiority and exteriority to which the characters and their habitats are subjected. Here, the proliferation of the pizzicati and the inarticulate continuum of the chorus respond to hordes of humans; there, clusters of timbres, precipitated glissandi and voices in aggregate attest to the vertigo and vestiges of passing time, whilst modern architecture replaces dilapidated buildings and skeletal façades. Elsewhere, the subway flies over a metal bridge, and violinists' bows ricochet over their strings like so many hypnotic shivers. Further on, notes stand out like beads of sweat, hauntingly repetitive, while a few questioning faces emerge, marked by humanity and solicitude. So many looks, so many mirror-effects, hybridizations and resonances which weave living branches and human unions together at the heart of a city in mutation.

 

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I MULTITUDES OF SOUNDS

In the thread of the narrative, the sound is not merely musical. And the narrative is pregnant with the sounds of the city, words that are spoken (never accompanied by the music), and the fascinating, deafening silence of the apes in the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, encaged in a dumbness which speaks of the self-satisfied violence of our species, deaf to all but itself.

 

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I THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST

The images in Yannick Bellon's film are the poetics of multiplicity: human, urban, subjective, emotional, resonant, temporal, organic, social, professional, passionate… The poetics of singularity, too, of the richness of one's identity and of "becoming oneself". The film is the convergence of the perceptions and sensibilities which empower the film's principal characters to become detached from the undifferentiated social amalgam, and to feel in repercussion the salient temptation to exist, the urgency of living…

 

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I SOMEWHERE IN THE INCOMPLETE

Vincent, intoxicated by life, fights against his demons and the fatigue of being himself in a world to which he is indifferent. In a final absence, a last imbalance, an ultimate disorder of someone else's doing, he accidentally falters and succumbs to the ill-fated attraction of the tarmac. Raphaële will now be alone, lost in her thoughts and the crowd. The strings' lyrical song softly emerges, peaceful in its slowness. The crowd grows in density, strings simmer, urban ethnic groups become compact, agglomerated, and in a final élan, the music reaches completion on a chord from the chorus which overhangs the mass of humanity. "One is always alone; one is always several."

 

Murmurings…

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