Sprawling and enthralling
Expansive doc unpacks the creative enigma of the late, great Morricone.
Ennio: The Maestro ★★★★★ Dir. Giuseppe Tornatore DOGWOOF/PIANO B PRODUZIONI. C/ST
THERE’S A telling disclosure midway through Giuseppe Tornatore’s compelling, 156-minute tribute to the globally renowned Italian soundtrack eminence. It concerns director Pier Paolo Pasolini who, we learn, had only ever used J.S. Bach compositions in his films before recruiting Morricone to score his 1966 neo-realist feature, Hawks And Sparrows. After that, Pasolini dispensed with Bach – the implication being that he had found his living equivalent.
Such lofty veneration is a hallmark of Ennio: The Maestro, with its eclectic parade of talking heads – everyone from Bernardo Bertolucci to Clint Eastwood and Bruce Springsteen – dishing out lavish encomiums for the uniquely gifted Roman composer. In marked contrast, Morricone’s own recollections (largely harvested from an 11-hour interview Tornatore conducted shortly before the composer’s passing in 2020) are couched in humility, often interspersed with beguiling, whisper-sung melodic fragments from his 500-plus soundtracks.
Born in 1928, Morricone’s life story has an aptly cinematic arc. Initially a trumpeter, like his father, when he began arranging for movies in the mid-’50s, he eschewed parts for the instrument so as not to offend papà, such was the meagre repute of film music in Italy – an irony, the composer observes, given his later predilection for corrida bugles in his scores for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western epics. Even as a contracted studio arranger for RCA Victor, Morricone initially worked under a pseudonym, fearing the censure of his conservatory tutor, the austere composer Goffredo Petrassi.
He would keep a toe in academic music, notably with the John Cageinspired Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, whose innovative spirit duly informed Morricone’s 1960s oeuvre – from the symphonic melodrama of Mina’s hit single Si Telefonado (about which the composer offers a lesson in minimalist theory begetting maximalist pop thrills) to the disorienting musique concrète soundtrack for Marco Bellocchio’s Fists In The Pocket. Similarly inventive music for Investigation Of A Citizen Above Suspicion, Elio Petri’s celebrated 1970 satire, so impressed Stanley Kubrick that he sought out Morricone to score A Clockwork Orange, a plan scuppered by the over-possessive Leone, who warned Kubrick off, saying, falsely, that the composer was still working on his A Fistful Of Dynamite. “It’s my only regret about a movie that I didn’t work on”, Morricone laments.
Elsewhere, we get fascinating glimpses into the genesis of masterpiece scores for the likes of Once Upon A Time In America, The Mission and Tornatore’s own Cinema Paradiso, while, amidst a torrent of film, TV and in-concert clips, a conveyor belt of eminent cineastes, from Quentin Tarantino to Wong KarWai, build the case for Morricone’s genius. Italian director Roberto Faenza even proposes that Morricone “may be the inventor of film music”. All of which makes the slight, bespectacled, nonagenarian composer, who is the still centre of this enthralling homage, seem even more miraculous.