Couples Retreat Soundtrack by Chris Neilan The Couples Retreat soundtrack. A.R. Rahman has sold more than 100 million records worldwide, plus 200 million cassettes. Yes, cassettes. He's one of the world's all time top selling recording artists, and a very influential figure indeed. He was also the first Indian citizen to win an Academy Award for his Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack in 2008 and just to show off, he won two. For the Couples Retreat soundtrack, his first work with a Hollywood studio, the Indian John Williams has produced a humourless if not entirely charmless accompaniment to a Vaughn/Favreau comedy, which treads a thin line between orchestral ambience and inconsequence, and ends up sounding something like James Bond's massage music.
Melding mild intrigue with jaunty woodwind and bongo rhythms might make a fitting accompaniment to the film's tropical island imagery, but it sure doesn't make for a thrilling listen. Pleasant would be a good way to describe it, if I wasn't so tempted to call it dull. And if I wasn't so assaulted with images of middle class men in hemp trousers hanging dreamcatchers over their futons. Rahman's Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack was a different kettle of fish altogether, but applying his undoubted compositional skill to a multiplex friendly relationship comedy seems to have had a detrimental effect on his brio the weaker tracks here have little more character than the title music to an RPG. Maybe some of the appeal of mixing traditional Indian musicality with the atypical symphony scoring of a Hollywood crowd-pleaser is lost in translation. http://www.movie-moron.com/?p=9687
