I've been enjoying the La Mala Educatión soundtrack which I picked up earlier this week. The film hasn't opened in DC yet; suffice to say I'm absolutely looking forward to it. There's nothing like the promise of a Pedro Almodóvar film around the corner to make one realize life ain't so mala after all!

I've only got a cursory comprehension of what the film is about, but I can get a fairly good idea from longtime (well, at least since the mid-nineties' melodrama Flower of My Secret) Almadóvar collaborator/ composer Alberto Iglesias's orchestration. Echoes of the late Bernard Herrmann's score for Hitchcock's Vertigo are bring heightened, soaring, and rather uneasy a film-noir feel to the score. This is definitely a darker, more baroque affair than precious efforts –those who swooned to the tropical night plaint of Caetano Veloso's "Cucurrucucu Paloma" in Talk to Her might be gasping for air a bit.

To hear the Cor Vivaldi-Ipsi-Petits Cantors de Catalunya (a boys' choir) soaringly sing Rossini's "Kyrie" is a at once portentous, stirring, and beautiful, and a haunting "Moon River," performed by what sounds like a castratti (but mostly not likely- do they still do that?), indicate audiences are apt to deal with some sober, tragic stuff with Almodóvar's latest. Then again, a camped-up "Quizás, Quizás, Quizás" (best known in America interpreted by Doris Day as "Perhaps,...,…" and in the UK as the opening theme to "Coupling"), and Little Tony's "Cuore Matto" – which I sadly admit I used to listen to all the time when I was studying Italian - there's still some over-the-top fun to be had.

Also on the foreign soundtrack front, the other week I received Clara et Moi, the latest offering from young maestro Benjamin Biolay. The film hasn't been released in the US but apparently it has been hugely successful in France. Aside from several sumptuous new instrumentals from Biolay, the album is a fairly humdrum affair for me, mostly a regurgitation of (or versions of) tracks I already own - the now de riguer Keren Ann's "Coin du Monde (Streets Go Down)," Bertrand Burgalet's "Ma Recontre" performed by the film's romantic leads Julie Gayet et Julien Boisselier, and a demo version of Biolay's duet with Chiara Mastroianni, "Grand Retour de La Chance," from this year's Home. However, as a passport for the neophyte traveler, Clara et Moi is as good an introduction as any to the some of the better pop music that has been coming out of France over the last few years.