Ennio (2024)

Ennio (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2024) There was no way this movie was going to hit any of the local theaters. It's too "inside", too limited interest, even if the potential audience has assuredly heard at least one of the composer's compositions (and that might be because of a beer commercial). And...it's mostly in Italian. But, thank the Academy for TCM. Monday night, they showed the recently released documentary (in the States, anyway—it'd been available in Italy since 2022), Ennio, a more than two hour look at the life and career of composer Ennio Morricone.

 

The subject of the documentary has such a legendary reputation—one stat: he composed scores for over 400 films of every genre (despite giving himself a deadline of quitting the business every decade), over a six decade career in the film industry. And, although his output slowed a bit from his peak at 19 films in a year, he was extraordinarily busy with concerts and collecting the accolades that he was due—like two late-in-life Academy Awards: one for his career, and one for his score for The Hateful Eight.

The film by Tornatore—who had the extraordinary good fortune to have Morricone score his film, Cinema Paradiso—is almost encyclopedic, sometimes too much, as the many talking heads pop in and pop out with little breathing room, recounting childhood stories, his teachers and influences, collaborators, and filmmakers who he composed for—or wish he had. Particularly of interest are those scenes documenting Morricone's forays into musique concrète, which, of course, punctuated his Leone soundtracks. The whip-cracks, whistles, and twangs of that earlier music gradually gave way to complex—and sometimes conflicting—harmonies that often approached the music of the spheres.

But, I love how the film starts. The maestro comes into his cluttered study, stretches, and lays down on the floor. For the next few minutes, he does some simple stretches, relaxing his body, in simple yoga-like movements, concentrating. Then, you see him attack a manuscript, penning notes aggressively like he's doing battle with it, scrambling to put the music in his head onto paper. He's approaching 90, but the energy is that of a young man. One could say that nobody composes music like that, at any age. 

 

But, then, nobody could. Morricone is—was—unique.

 

And his music is eternal.

Morricone playing themes for his class-mate/film collaborator Sergio Leone