Drive (Various)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV_3Dpw-BRY Released to more or less critical acclaim last year, Drive was seen as an outstanding example of style over substance; an experience that, despite a stylish and superficial demeanour, nevertheless got under one's skin for weeks on end. One of the main problems that some critics and punters had with the film was the aloof, a-everything nature of Ryan Gosling's character, The Driver, someone who our own Ryan Stevenson labelled '
irritatingly silent and smug' in a particularly entertaining rant. True, The Driver says very little, and to suggest he lacks expression indicates that there is something happening on his face, which there isn't. Instead, Nicholas Winding Refn appears to have used a different medium, that of audio, to express The Driver's thoughts and feeling. The soundtrack, a mixture of songs by Kavinsky, Chromatics and others, plus an original score by Cliff Martinez, fits its purpose beautiful. Lingering and understated, the soundtrack is pitched in a startlingly serene manner which continues even as the film becomes an indulgent bloodbath; only when The Driver is shaken by the shoot-out does it venture into anything other than hypnotic. Like The Driver, the soundtrack feels somewhat disconnected from the world it inhabits yet serenely in place as the realisation that, in this world of gangsters and the ruthless, he is the most dangerous of them all dawns into place. The soundtrack, meanwhile, has pre-empted this, its continous presence making the tense silences all the more noticeable.
Joe Trotter