Unfaithful

In the light of the endless complaints that soundtrack CDs simply aren't long enough I call attention to Jan A P Kaczmarek's Unfaithful which, at a shade under three quarters of an hour, outstays its welcome after considerably less than that. I have read the moderately positive reviews of this score from fellow soundtrack reviewers, generally enthralled by the haunting and relaxing nature of the music. They are not wrong in this assessment, but for all that, it is really rather repetitive and the basic melodic material isn't all that interesting.

Maybe that's a tad harsh, the main themes are good in an atmospheric kind of way, but given how samey the score tends to be and that I've listened to it several times, I still couldn't honestly recall the main theme easily. The most sweeping statement is given midway through in Unfaithful and it is a good piece of production since it's about that point I was rather losing interest after yet another recapitulation of the more erotic secondary theme. Perhaps the most interesting bit of musical innovation is the pseudo orgasmic vocalisations of Jorane and Sussan Deyhim, which don't really carry the melody, but add breathy vocal effects over the rest of the orchestra. It doesn't give the impression of being digitally processed, for which I am grateful as it could so easily have been played with to give it a more synthetically ethereal quality.

Despite my assertions of it being overtly repetitive, it just about manages to keep the listener. It certainly would have been no bad thing to cut a few of the earlier tracks and par the entire thing down to a more modest half hour. Perhaps I'm being ungrateful towards Varese's more generous album length policy here, but an overly repetitive score is just that, no matter who releases the album. If this represents the larger proportion of the music in the film, then it undoubtedly works marvelously at sustaining the atmosphere of an erotic thriller and the insertion of the main theme at certain intervals no doubt doesn't seem too much, but when all the music is lumped together on an album, it's simply a bit too much.