Animals in Love

AMG Review of Animals in Love

Thom Jurek
All Music Guide

Philip Glass' original score for Laurent Charbonnier's Animals in Love is one of those beautiful soundtracks for what seems to be an odd film -- until you sit down and actually watch it. The way Glass' music, written for a chamber orchestra, flows in and out of these images underscores their actually touching moments and picks up on the human sense of strangeness when encountering the animals' mating habits, understanding that such encounters are not merely novel, but at time times reach the profound. Certainly some of his trademark tropes are here, but he's so far beyond most of those now in his method of composing that they are used merely for cinematic effect, not as compositional fundamentals. What Glass reveals about himself in this score is that he's at the very peak of his own powers as a film composer; he understands not only what's on the screen, but where viewers locate themselves in the process of seeing, making for an intuitive, sometimes dramatic piece of music that stands on its own very well.