Various artists
Hallam Foe: Original Soundtrack
(Domino)
By Todd Lavoie
Some things take a mighty long time to wash up on American shores from abroad. Take Hallam Foe – the British independent film was released last year overseas, but is only now beginning to hit stateside screens, thanks to a distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures. (For whatever reason, the delightfully odd little gem has been re-titled Mister Foe for the American market.)
Trust me: this film’s worth the wait. Charming but occasionally unsettling, whimsical but rippling with currents of darkness, it’s engrossing as hell, and Jamie Bell (Billy Elliott) is riveting as the troubled young man in the title role. In any case, I’m here to focus on the music – and the soundtrack is a wonderful, headphone-hugging treat. Keeping the original title of the film despite the name change on the marquee, the disc works flawlessly as the score to such a curious mix of sweetness and foreboding. Even without the accompanying visuals, these 16 songs link together to sustain a devilishly peculiar mood over the course of an hour. A fine tribute, then, to a film which whirls love into death, innocence into obsession, cuteness into the grotesque.
Hallam Foe takes place mainly in two locations: the rolling hills and ice-cold lochs of the Scottish countryside, and the rooftops and lookout spots above Edinburgh. The soundtrack does an impressive job of conveying both landscapes, sliding skillfully from agrarian folk to pavement-hitting electronics and lurching big-city rock ‘n’ roll. Maybe “sliding” isn’t the right term – “gliding” might be more appropriate, given the film’s focus on Hallam wanting to be above it all, looking down from great heights. Many of the songs contained here are buoyed along by a sense of weightlessness: rhythms wash in and wash out, synth blips and bleeps soar in the highest registers, and occasionally disembodied voices hover and hum somewhere in the vague distance.