The front cover of the soundtrack to the Australian Western The Proposition shows a barren desert landscape. The back cover depicts a man tied to a fence in a kneeling Christ pose, his shirt torn open and his back whipped to shreds. These images say a lot about the film they represent, but they also speak to the timbre of the music that comprises the score. The Proposition Original Soundtrack is a dark and downbeat affair, drenched in violins and holding the promise of violence.

Not that anything else should be expected from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, the score's composers. Cave is the notorious frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds; Ellis, in addition to being a rotating member of the Seeds' current incarnation, plays in the instrumental outfit The Dirty Three. Both have plenty of experience making music that, among other things, often thrums with melancholic atmosphere. The two, Ellis in particular, should be naturals in creating the kind of score deserved by a grim film like The Proposition.

Creating popular music, though, and creating memorable film scores are two different spheres of experience. Success in one of the above fields does not guarantee success in the other, as several rock artists have discovered. Cave and Ellis realize this, and thus dial down some of their more bombastic tendencies so as not to overwhelm the film. What results is a score possessed of a strange beauty and a tendency towards image-making; even if one hasn't seen The Proposition (and I haven't yet), the images that the music accompanies are easily visualized.

Interestingly, Cave and Ellis haven't stopped at evocation. The soundtrack is not intended as a mere complement — there's an entire parallel narrative, about a lone gunman and his relation to his environment as he rides towards an unnamed goal, that has been constructed within the music. I'm unsure as to how this will work in the larger context of the film (it could work like magic, or it could be too on-the-nose), but as a stand-alone work of art, it's impressive. The narrative gives the music a structure and a flow so that it feels like a complete piece rather than a loose series of suites.

This cohesiveness is bolstered by Cave and Ellis' use of certain motifs. There are musical passages and bits that pop up multiple times within the soundtrack. Notably, there are two recurring threads that bridge songs and fill in the story — "The Proposition" and "The Rider." The former is a mournful violin-and-bass-drum piece that sets the stage for what is and is yet to come; the latter has Cave murmuring about the titular character's travails over minimal ambient-sound looping.

Article Author: Steve Carlson

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

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