ACHIEVEMENT IN MUSIC: ORIGINAL SCORE – POLYTECHNIQUE

If there’s one word to describe the way in which Benoît Charest developed the score for the tragic story of Polytechnique, it’s ‘delicately.’

But Charest didn’t take the easy road with his work on this film about the 1989 Montreal massacre, which he notes was constantly walking the fine line of overdoing it.

‘It’s a trap to go with sadness and the obvious emotions, so you try to counterbalance it with the music,’ he explains. ‘A way to come about it is to be quite minimalist and not overpower with sound, with orchestrations or with harmonic movement. The music had to be very respectful and very sober in a certain way, but also try to express some of the madness at the same time.’

Charest is perhaps best known for composing the Oscar- and Grammy-nominated soundtrack to 2001’s The Triplets of Belleville, as well as the track for the National Film Board short Runaway by Cordell Barker (The Cat Came Back).

Charest also says the heavy use of guitars in Polytechnique is a nod to Jimmy Page, and that one of his gentle, repetitive guitar themes was a demo that actually ended up in the final score.

‘The director [Denis Villenueve] loved it so much that I tried on many occasions to do a proper, well-played, well-recorded version of it, and he didn’t want it,’ he says. ‘That’s the thing with film music. Sometimes magic and imperfection, I find, is what directors look for. Sometimes things become too boring when they’re just too perfect.’