Bagpipes to fly out to sea
The Sea Inside (2004) · Alejandro Amenábar
The Sea Inside tells the last years of Ramón Sampedro, a Galician sailor left quadriplegic after diving into the sea, who spent almost thirty years in bed and fought for the right to die. A story like that could easily have been drowned in sad music. Amenábar, who writes the scores for his own films, went the other way: clear, almost bright melodies for a man who cannot leave his bed.
The key is Galicia. Amenábar brought in the piper Carlos Núñez, who did more than play: he adapted the director's ideas and gave them colour. Bagpipes, flute and traditional instruments blend with an orchestra recorded in London, the London Session Orchestra, and that blend makes the film sound like a real place rather than any drama.
The album also has two pieces not written by Amenábar that matter as much as his own. One is "Negra sombra", the Galician song with music by Xoán Montes on a poem by Rosalía de Castro, in the version by Luz Casal and Carlos Núñez. The other is "Nessun dorma", the aria from Puccini's Turandot, sung by the tenor José Manuel Zapata.
The score won the Goya for best original music, one of the film's fourteen Goyas, and the film also won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It is the best proof that Amenábar does not compose on a whim: few directors have known so well what their film needed to sound like.