French musician Anthony Gonzalez, aka electronic/dream pop band M83, has composed the score to Gilles Marchand’s out-of-competition Cannes film, “Black Heaven” according to details about the film listed on the Cannes website.
A French screenwriter/director, Marchand has only directed two feature length films, 2003’s “Who Killed Bambi?” and this latest 2010 Cannes picture, but two other films he wrote, 2005’s “Lemming,” and 2000’s “Harry, He’s Here to Help,” have also been represented at the Croisette in the past.
What’s the film about? Well, it stars Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet (“La belle personne”), Louise Bourgoin (“The Girl from Monaco”), Melvil Poupaud (“A Christmas Tale”), Pauline Etienne and is about an ominous-sounding on-line game.
Let’s go to the synopsis:
Gaspard and Marion are in love and enjoying summer in the south of France with a bunch of friends. But one day Gaspard meets Audrey and his life takes a much somber path. Audrey is beautiful, poisonous and lives a double life in an on-line game called Black Hole where she is called Sam. There she attracts victims and seduces them to commit suicide in real life. Creating an avatar who is miles away from him, Gaspard creeps further into Black Hole setting on a search for Sam, only to find another terrible truth.
It’s a bit of a weird choice to tap Gonzalez for the score as his music is much more ethereal, atmospheric and serene than dark — especially in recent years where he seems to have shied away from his Aphex Twin-ish sound and moved closer to a Cocteau Twins’ like romantic shine, but we’ll assume Marchand knows what he’s doing.
Or, he’s tapping Gonzalez specifically for “Car Chase Terror!” a “Blair Witch”-esque track from the 2005 album, Before the Dawn Heals Us, that was so bad, it put us off listening to M83 for months (and we weren’t the only ones, Pitchfork put the track in their top 15 worst things about 2005). Luckily, since then Gonzalez/M83 haven’t had any major missteps so here’s hoping it’s not a synthy-horror-core score and something that plays to his celestial music strengths. Update: here’s the trailer.
