MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Throughout the 1990s, the numerous crises in the Balkan nations of the former Yugoslavia – Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Macedonia – have never been far from our television screens and our newspapers. Most recently, the coverage of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic’s ruthless “cleansing” of the ethnic Albanian population in the republic of Kosovo brought to light a series of terrible human tragedies seldom seen in Europe since the end of World War II. When the United Nations intervened, it was up to the combined peacekeeping forces – men and women from different countries around the world committed to ending the bloodshed – to step into the firing line and try to bring comparative peace to that troubled part of the globe. Peter Kosminsky’s film Warriors, made by the BBC for British TV, is an attempt to capture a dramatised version of their work on film.

Warriors stars Welsh heartthrob Ioan Gruffudd (Titanic, Hornblower) as a member of the peacekeeping force sent to Bosnia during the height of the conflict. With the intentions of helping the citizens, and with the supposed backing of the United Nations, the force instead finds itself caught up in a war which it doesn’t fully understand and, more importantly, is virtually powerless to stop. As director Kosminsky states in the CD’s liner notes, “the soldiers were forced to stand by and watch whilst neighbour butchered neighbour, having had their hands tied by an ill-defined political mandate”.

For the music, Kosminsky again turned to Debbie Wiseman, with whom he had collaborated on his earlier movie The Dying of the Light. Wiseman is a composer known primarily for her large scale romantic scores such as Tom & Viv, Haunted and Wilde, so it may come as something of a surprise to discover that Warriors is very, very different from any of her previous works. Although maintaining a sense of beauty and a gift for melody, this score’s predominant mood is one of total and complete sadness.

The whole score is built upon a single main theme, first heard in the opening track ‘Warriors’, and featured in some form or another in nearly every subsequent track. The score’s gimmick, if it can be described as such, is the use of a quartet of female voices who perform a heartbreaking ethnic song in what I can only assume is a Serbo-Croatian dialect. There is a definite Arabic inflection to the melody of the main theme as well, as if to illustrate the suffering undergone by the region’s Muslim inhabitants, and in standout cues such as ‘Arrival in Vitez’, ‘To Observe And No More’ and ‘The Return Home’, the four vocalists intone a searing lament accompanied by percussion and ethnic flutes. In addition, Wiseman herself performs a series of beautiful piano solos of the theme, especially in ‘Twelve Hours’, ‘Nothing To Say’ and the final track, ‘Far From Home’.

From the track listings, one might assume that cues with titles such as ‘Massacre in Ahmici’, ‘Fire in Vitez’ and ‘Booby Trap’ would revolve around action, but Wiseman cleverly avoids glorifying the depictions of the horrors of war. Instead, Wiseman scores them in an intentionally contradictory fashion, mainly with layer upon layer of deep strings and moody vocals, downplaying the on-screen carnage with an almost funereal solemnity and allowing her music to quietly and hauntingly emphasise the tragedy and waste of human life.

The only drawback to Warriors as a score is its constant repetitiveness which, although necessary in the context of the film, serves to make the CD a little tedious. Such trivialities are less important in circumstances as this, though, especially when faced with such an important subject matter. Wiseman’s maturity as a composer, and her excellent understanding of the musical needs of her films continues to impress. Although Warriors is by no means the most enjoyable score of Wiseman’s career to date, it is undoubtedly one of her most intelligent.

Track Listing:

• Warriors (1:08)
• Arrival in Vitez (2:51)
• Rescue from Sase (2:33)
• To Observe And No More (3:43)
• Massacre in Ahmici (2:43)
• Herzog (3:03)
• Twelve Hours (2:09)
• Fire in Vitez (2:33)
• A Married Woman (2:26)
• Death of Skeeter (3:01)
• The Return Home (4:22)
• Search for Naser (1:19)
• Nothing To Say (3:53)
• Booby Trap (3:25)
• Just Gangsters (2:20)
• Romeo and Juliet (1:33)
• Far From Home (2:21)

Running Time: 45 minutes 32 seconds

BBC Music WMSF60190-2 (1999)

Music composed and conducted by Debbie Wiseman. Orchestrations by Debbie Wiseman. Featured musical soloists Chris Lacey, Keith Thompson, Perry Montague-Mason and Debbie Wiseman. Special vocal performances by Mary Carewe, Helen Hampton, Mae McKenna and Nicole Tibbels. Recorded and mixed by Steve Price. Mastered by Mike Brown. Album produced by Debbie Wiseman.