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Rating: How can one define it? World music? Mboh... yes. It can be done. But it's a cluster of music too stuffed to represent Gustavo's music. Gustavo Santaolalla is not a friend of mine. He's a soundtrack composer. But not like many others. He's not Nicola Piovani, Ludovico Einaudi, Andrea Guerra... he is "the film" that becomes music.
Have you seen 21 Grams? Beautiful, isn't it? I would say it's magnificent, although that's my personal opinion. And Amores Perros? Wonderful films. Disarming films. Well. The thing is that, however, films can't stand alone, they need to hold onto something solid, something that doesn't collapse after the first frames. It's called a soundtrack, or "soundtrack" if we really want to Americanize it.
21 Grams is just one of the films soundtracked by Santaolalla. There's Amores Perros. And there's another one, in particular, which if I close my eyes, I still get immersed in the unspoiled and endless landscapes of Latin America at the call of that music: The Motorcycle Diaries.
Music with Latin sounds, yes, but it doesn't limit itself to delineating and defining a specific part of the world and the two protagonists on their motorcycle they call "poderosa", on the contrary, it spans, it creates sounds within others. Like a Chinese box that always encloses a smaller one, and you get surprised because you think that's always the last one, and instead, no, there's always a smaller one yet.
Santaolalla is many sound forms enclosed in one: he is Argentine tango, he is classical music, he is Latin tradition, he is rock, he is electronic as well.
Try listening to him.
Even by putting the film in your DVD or VHS, besides watching it, try listening to it.
Bon voyage.
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