Emile Mosseri: The king of 2020's film music
Wednesday, April 21, 2021 at 4:20PM 
He may have only been composing film scores since 2016, but Emile Mosseri has quickly become one of the most exciting composers in today's Hollywood. At least, he's got a prime spot on my list of ones-to-watch. Two years ago, he made a big splash with the hauntingly beautiful compositions for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. Joe Talbot's delicate tone poem about a city and its people earned much critical acclaim and even a couple of awards for the young composer. Flash forward to today, and Mosseri's at the top of the world, having conquered his first Oscar nomination for Minari. What's more, that wasn't even the only masterful score he delivered in 2020…
Miranda July's cinema isn't for everyone. Her latest, Kajillionaire, doesn't go against that, embracing and celebrating its alienating power even as it tries to tell a story of surprising emotional depth, darkness, pain. The narrative revolves around Old Dolio, the daughter, and accomplice of two small-time crooks. The trio grifts their way through life, always tittering on the knife's edge until the arrival of Melanie throws their balance. In Teorema-like fashion, the young woman captivates each family member while also illuminating what's lacking in their existence. Watching Old Dolio come to grips with her need for affection is nothing short of harrowing.
Whether it manifests in pink bubbles or oddball poses, the quirkiness which characterizes the director's work is ever-present in Kajillionaire. It's so obvious and overt it's almost brittle, nearly blistering to observe and try to engage. The performances try to negotiate the equilibrium between naturalism and balletic oddity. Not all of it works together, but the general effect is electrifying, fascinating, riveting to grapple with, even as the viewer may feel repelled by what's on-screen. One of the glues that hold all of it together is, surprisingly enough, the score.
Using the piano as a starting point, Mosseri was interested in digging out the story's romantic possibilities, contrasting the crook's lilting manipulations with an aching need for love. That sentiment cuts across Kajillionaire's comedic abrasiveness, revealing, from early on, what's truly at the heart of the picture. In some sense, the score serves as a Rosetta Stone that helps the audience decipher what July's up to with her eccentric cast of characters. It's not an effort of forced-upon demonstration but a feat of illuminating music. Mosseri never tells the viewer what to feel, though he does call attention to what exists beyond the images' surface-level strangeness.
Above all that, Mosseri's compositions are gorgeous. While not contradicting the contextual weirdness of Kajillionaire, his music sings a sad hymn for lost souls, peppering carnivalesque melodies with jumbled jagged atonality. It's like a caress mixed with a bloody scratch, a kiss with sharp edges. After watching the film, I found myself remembering its wondrous music, savoring a haze of sonic joy with a bittersweet aftertaste. Mosseri need only have composed the score of Kajillionaire to deserve to be named among the top film artists of 2020. Minari's even better.
Again, we find the composer playing a precise game of contrasts with the narrative containing his music. Lee Isaac Chung's semiautobiographical family drama was shot in a very traditional type of American indie realism. The sort which we are accustomed to seeing out of Sundance, all natural light and hand-held camera, lived-in performances and not a hint of formalistic stylization. While such cinematic approaches aren't necessarily inadequate, I find them a bit commonplace. If I happen to catch a slew of them at any given festival, I'm also prone to feel disappointed.
To my delight, Minari does circumvent utter conventionality. It does this through its music and how the score draws an abstract lyricism out of the picture. Thus, the modesty of the storytelling is elevated to poetic grandiosity, mundane life treated with the same portentous artistry one might expect from an operatic classic. It's not that the music is necessarily old-fashioned. Still, its sonority evokes feelings of emotional sweep, rich orchestrations (40 string players!) which make themselves heard without ever subsuming into the background. In Minari, the aural landscape is as essential as the human one.
The inclusion of abstract vocalizations and sung lyrics also help position the film in the realm of remembrance. Rather than coming off as a mere register of day-to-day life, Minari gains a sense of melodic nostalgia from its score. We don't lose ourselves in the candid observation. Instead, we're drawn into an immersive dream of old memories, the ghosts of long-lost sounds twisting themselves into oneiric symphonies. The process of creating the score was central to this symbiotic relationship between sound and images from which the film's ephemerous tone blossomed.
With The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Kajillionaire, Emile Mosseri composed the score after filming was done. Temp music was used for those flicks, helping to get at the right sonority for each project. On the other hand, Mosseri started working while shooting hadn't begun in Minari, using the script as a guideline. Consequentially, Chung had the basis of the score with him when shooting his actors, organically weaving the flick's several elements into a cohesive whole. Thus, specific sequences also came from the music, instead of the other way around, allowing Mosseri to have great creative freedom in his craft.
As one says, the results speak for themselves. Minari's sound is lush and romantic, elementally evocative and ethereal in the same note for such a small-sized drama. The composer might indulge in bombast, but he never forgets to be delicate, handling the director's personal story like overripe fruit. Handle it too roughly, and it might bruise, sweet flesh bursting out of fragile skin. You have to be as graceful as Mosseri is, treating the narrative as a precious delicacy whose marvels he's highlighting with care. The strings weep, but there's also space for Yeri Han's airy voice, the plucking of a lonely guitar, the twinkle of the piano. I'd give him the Oscar in a heartbeat, but I'm afraid AMPAS may think otherwise. In any case, it's a major achievement and a soundtrack I'll treasure forevermore.
Reader Comments (3)
Amazingly talented composer. Also, what a dreamboat!
I’ll have to listen to Minari again.
I loved Last Black Man in San Francisco. He totally deserved an Oscar nomination for that.
Just saw Minari last night. His score really grew on me, which for me is true of great music. The film, itself, also grew over its running time.
In addition; Me, You and Everyone We Know is one of the best films of 2005.