"Playing Love"

"The Legend of 1900" is perhaps one of the best films no one has seen, as someone once wrote. I knew of it years ago only because I was a rabid fan of anything Giuseppe Tornatore directed, so I kept track of his work (his more famous films include "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso" and "Malena"). When I learned that he was making his first English-language film, to be titled "La Leggenda del Pianista sull'Oceano," I waited for it to open in Singapore. It never did, but they did release it in VCD format, which I bought.

His music collaborator was, of course, Ennio Morricone, who wrote the scores for his earlier films and has written some of the most beautiful music in film history. Music matters in this movie, because the plot revolves around a piano player who has spent his entire life aboard a ship. Very poetically, his world is all the ocean and the span of his piano's keyboard. The soundtrack is wonderful, but one piece stands out for me, because its meaning is derived from the scene over which it plays.

1900 (the protagonist is named for the year he was born in) is reluctantly making a recording aboard the ship, but as he plays, he catches sight of a young woman outside in the morning light, using the porthole as a mirror while she wipes the sleep from her eyes. There isn't a whit of self-consciousness about her; she doesn't see him, after all, and in her innocence, she now directs his fingers upon the piano. And how he watches her, and studies her, panicking slightly when she wanders beyond the frame of the porthole. His eyes search for her and find her again in another porthole, a small circle that encapsulates her face and the sea behind her. Like a photograph in an old-fashioned locket, but far better, for it's alive with her movements, the wind, the curling waves. It's a perfect moment for 1900. Everything that matters to him is right before him.

For the viewer, it's a beautiful combination of cinematography, music, and emotion; a three-minute story played out without words. You see 1900's emotions on Tim Roth's expressive face, but you hear them even more vividly in the music he plays.

There are other great scenes in the film, like the piano duel between Jelly Roll Morton (the inventor of jazz) and 1900. In that one, 1900's playing leaves you slack-jawed. But this is the scene that stops your heart, or reminds you that you have one and that it still responds to beauty and emotion. And music.

Playing Love, by Ennio Morricone

Posted by Monoceros at November 13, 2009 3:31 PM