The Academy Awards nominations for 2024 have just been announced, and already we have a contender for 2025 in the category of Best Film Score. Un Monde Violent is a French thriller about two brothers who decide to hold up a truck of smartphones bound for the warehouse where they work. The trucker ends up dead, and the brothers end up in a world of violence. Someone should have told them this was a really bad idea. A really good idea was to commission cellist Gaspar Claus to write the music. We’ve followed Claus ever since he appeared on FareWell Poetry’s Hoping for the Invisible to Ignite back in 2011, and this is one of his best works to date. The tension is translated into the soundtrack, whose internal buzz draws the listener into this criminal landscape.
The tone is set by a foreboding “Ouverture,” which drips with warning and dread. A low drone is met by another, then plucks of the cello, a glissando, and already the feeling that not all is going to end well. By the end of the short piece, there is also a bitter melancholy. As “Un Muertre” is only the second track, we wonder if the murder takes place this early in the film; if so, the protagonists are plunged quickly into dangerous atmospheres, conveyed by layers of strings. We suspect that these tracks have been resequenced for the album, as the next piece is “Moto Joie” (“Motorcycle Joy”), which relays a feeling of reverie, an innocence before the slaughter. The tonal shift deepens one’s appreciation of the score by underlining an understandng of what will be lost, conveying an awful inevitability.
“Trahison” (“Treason”) offers a sense of propulsion with a near-electronic sheen that carries into “Moto Drame,” the epitome of conflict, with textures akin to a clock and a swarm of bees. Reading the track titles, someone – we know not whom – will be headed to the hospital after the chase. “Le Père” (“The Father,” also the name of an award-winning French play) ratchets up the tension one more notch in preparation for “La Dernière Course” (“The Last Race”), which we suspect will end in another death and an inescapable fate, because French films tend to honor a downward spiral instead of tacking on a Hollywood ending. We also expect a bittersweet denouement.
The very fact that we’re playing the entire film out in our heads based on only the trailer and the score is a testament to Claus’ ability to color with sound. The most unusual moment – a marching band that pops up in the penultimate track – is the part we most want to see. However the film is received, the score is already worthy of public recognition. (Richard Allen)