Here’s the downside to having an Oscar shortlist: Completely sidelining great contenders so early in the season.
One oversight by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Music branch this year was the “sexy and dangerous” original score, as the pic’s composer Isabella Summers puts it, of Netflix’s feature take on D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
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And, yes, per Summers, Florence and the Machine is still together. As the British musician-turned-composer explains today on Crew Call, she was coming off a tour and got the chance to supply a song to indie pic Assassination Nation.
From there she was encouraged to make her foray into scoring, first working with Mark Isham on the Hulu limited series Little Fires Everywhere, on which they notched an Emmy nom for original dramatic limited series score. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the first of four film scores by Summers to be unveiled.
For Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Summers delivers a vibrant, lush classical score with echoes of Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky and Gustav Holst, continually striking a balance between the big bang romance scenes to the more intimate moments in the story of Connie (Emma Corrin) who is stuck, bottled up in a marriage with an aristocratic husband who became paralyzed from an injury fighting in World War I. She finds love in Oliver, the gamekeeper on their grand estate.
here’s a lot of kissing in the rain in the middle of the farmland to put it mildly. Key for Summers was capturing Connie’s “frustration and tempestuous nature” with filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre often drawn to sometimes the most simplest chords.
You can listen to our conversation with Summers below: