Director Xavier Dolan is by far the youngest director ever to have a film in competition here in Venice. His newest film, an adaption of a theatrical piece by the French Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, has received much praise from both critics and audiences alike. The film maintains the psychological thriller aspect of the play and mixes it with the intense drama of a broken family: three isolated characters adrift in their lives. Tom á la Ferme was a departure from the norm for its composer Gabriel Yared. It is quite a modern sounding score and has such a presence in the film- in the words of the director himself it is “really like an extra character”. It brought the film to a whole new level in terms of atmosphere, helping to draw the audience into the emotionally twisted world of the main protagonists and successfully underscores both the emotional aspects of the film  - in this case, a general sense of loneliness - as well as the more dramatic, suspense-laden aspects. Dolan noted that he felt it also “gave the film a volume” it did not formally possess and simultaneously “binded all the elements together”. In short, it was a performance in itself. He also noted how much he appreciated the psychological thriller elements of the score writing and drew parallels between it and the works of Hitchcock and Mahler, in particular the themes from Death in Venice.
Yared notably fashions scores that are marked by a very symphonic sound, stemming from his training in Classical Counterpoint and Harmony. He also tends to lean heavily on the string section and orchestrates music in a way that balances sequences of complex counterpoint with those of strong, melancholic solo lines. This score was no exception: in general, I found it to be rich in feeling and complexity and filled with interesting solo melodies, each branded with a trademark lack of harmonic predictability. This unpredictability stems from Yared’s years in Brazil and the resulting influence of the country’s colourful folk music tradition. His melodies thus tend to evolve organically and bring with them a slight exoticism and a tremendous sense of beauty and space. His most well known scores, for example; Camille Claudel, Das Leben der Anderen and The English Patient all demonstrate this.
I felt that this was a promising new enterprise for Yared and displays to great effect, his innate talent for conjuring up great intensity and gravitas: qualities which lend themselves particularly well to dramatic stories such as Tom á la Ferme. 25/30