The tensions between music and film, especially those created in isolation, can, as Cave has observed, create ‘…suddenly something quite magical…’ Together, with musical colleague Warren Ellis, this is what they have attempted to do with Director David Olehoffen’s Loin des Hommes (Far From Men), a triple prize-winner at the Venice Film Festival last year, and which stars Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb.

Adapted from a short story, The Guest, by Albert Camus, it’s a tale of divided loyalties and colonialist violence set in 1954, near the beginning of Algeria’s War of independence. In Loin des Hommes, a French teacher in a small Algerian village forms an unexpected bond with a dissident, and is then ordered to turn him in to the authorities.

Not unexpectedly, while Camus’ story is more nuanced and ambiguous, Loin des Hommes tends to simplify matters, via the straightforward, somewhat cliqued characterisations of the main protagonists, although parables with the existing ‘war on terror’ are striking.

Minimal, and atmospheric, the sound paintings of the film are largely built around the piano (Cave) and violin (Ellis), married to the widescreen vistas of the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. In addition, there are touches of mandolin, percussion, celeste, guitar and other instrumentation. Vocals are used very sparingly. Making much use of Ellis’s looped violin motifs as the basis for many of the pieces, but largely eschewing the sounds and styles of North African music, the soundtrack attempts to subtly enhance a film, that while featuring sporadic moments of violence, is largely predicated around the relationship of the two main protagonists, as they seek to develop an understanding of each other, the growing and complex conflict, and a way out of their respective situations.

Together since 1995, mainly in Nick Cave’s the Bad Seeds, but also in Bad Seeds offshoot, Grinderman, they have been scoring films since 2005’s The Proposition, always seemingly attracted to the competing and compelling forces of humanity and inhumanity (Compassion and violence), and the darker recesses of the human psyche and soul.

As a standalone soundtrack, their score is perhaps less inviting than their previous works, more minimal in application, and at times, quite simplistic. Cave has inadvertently given the game away by noting, when referring to how he adds to Ellis’s violin: ‘To sit at a piano, put chords onto a linear loop and make something out of that is just an easy and very pleasurable way to work’. That may be true, but it is also true that this music is a world away from the grinding blood, sweat and tears that Cave pours into his work as a lyricist with his band.

Having said that the combination of the rustic with the mildly symphonic sounds works very well at times, befitting the time the film was set in, but also the modern filmic production values that were involved in its execution. And it largely works for its foreboding, yet gentle ambience, never overly intruding on what is essentially an audio and visual story of folk caught up in the wider ravages of colonialist warfare.
Jeff Hemmings