Released: 24/02/23
I remember watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 film Amélie in my youth and thinking, as, I imagine, did many others similarly callow and idealistic, that it might be the greatest movie I’d ever seen. Rewatching it years later, as someone who, in the words of Neil Young, “knew the feeling of losing once or twice”, I still enjoyed it, but the magical-realist whimsy was sometimes a little much. What I did still love however, without reservation, was Yann Tiersen’s score – particularly the lovelorn folk-waltz of ‘La valse d’Amélie’, and the Erik Satie-indebted ‘Comptine d'un autre été’, which might just be the most heartbreaking piano work ever composed. Indeed, the latter also features on Tiersen’s equally entrancing score for the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin!, which has received a long-overdue reissue. More musically ambitious than its predecessor, there are even times, as with the meditative repetition of ‘Preparations for the last TV Fake’, that the influence of modernist composers such as Philip Glass can be heard. But it is nothing more than distant echo, for no one sounds quite like Yann Tiersen.