Lisbon (Poor Things)
Alexandre Desplat
A waltz that isn't quite a waltz — Desplat takes the familiar triple meter and introduces just enough rhythmic uncertainty to make the dance feel slightly wrong, which is exactly right for Bella Baxter's Lisbon episode. The orchestration is warm but slightly queasy, strings rubbing against each other at intervals that feel almost tender and almost painful simultaneously. There's something of the music-box in its melodic presentation, that tinny innocence of a mechanism that doesn't fully understand what it's playing. Lisbon in the film is a threshold — between naivety and experience, between childhood curiosity and the brutality of the adult world. The music captures that threshold with remarkable precision, neither fully innocent nor fully knowing. It plays like a memory of somewhere you've never been, nostalgic for an experience still in progress. Beautiful and slightly vertiginous.
medium
2020s
delicate, vertiginous, nostalgic
British-American
Film Score, Classical. Chamber Waltz. bittersweet, vertiginous. Opens with familiar waltz warmth before rhythmic uncertainty introduces instability, capturing the precise threshold between naivety and the brutality of experience.. energy 4. medium. danceability 4. valence 5. vocals: instrumental, no vocals. production: chamber strings, music-box melodic presentation, queasy close-interval harmonics, light orchestration. texture: delicate, vertiginous, nostalgic. acousticness 7. era: 2020s. British-American. Moments of transition or quiet reflection on an experience still in progress.