Distasteful snob comment: obviously I saw the film immediately after it came out (one of my first visits to what was then the new Barker's Pool Odeon in Sheffield), early in 1987, when we cognoscenti would mutter in hushed tones about how "the new Bertolucci" showed that the director's Freudianism ran deeper than his Marxism. Then I scoffed at the people who were suddenly interested, and became more snooty about the film, when it went and won the Best Film Oscar a few months later, thus becoming a suitable date movie for my landlady and her new boyfriend.
I don't think I really noticed the music that first time. It won an Oscar, too. That wasn't what sent me down to Their Price on The Moor to buy it. I think it was some TV profile of David Byrne that showed him at work researching Chinese music before he made the five tracks that he contributes to this CD. The tracks by 坂本龍一 that open the album are nice, if a little on the sweet side (though, ouch, there's another one referring to a stillborn baby). The Byrne pieces are by no means dramatic or outstanding, but still quietly very impressive, I feel. They point the way towards the para-personal music of The Forest, and are once again testament to the extraordinary range and depth of DB's work between 1977 and the late '80s.
Distasteful spoiler: I watched the film again with Lucy on DVD one Saturday last year. When the ex-emperor-now-gardener reaches behind the throne and opens the little receptacle, and the grasshopper that was placed there decades before hops out, Lucy asked, "can grasshoppers really live that long?" As they say, Duh!
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