The music scores vying for this year’s Genie Award are as versatile as the films they were created for, with classical approaches competing against French jazz and electronic beats.

Benoit Charest’s score for the animated feature The Triplets of Belleville, directed by Sylvain Chomet, is the odds-on favorite for the trophy. With little dialogue in the film, the music is central in telling the story of an old woman who teams with an aging sister song-and-dance group to find her kidnapped grandson.

Charest says the score was influenced by French jazz from the 1940s to ’60s. Although it is the Montreal-based Charest’s first Genie nom, Triplets’ music has already received plenty of kudos, including a best original song nom at the 2004 Academy Awards for Belleville Rendez-vous, cowritten with Chomet, and Charest’s score was also rewarded at France’s Les Cesar awards.

‘I’m glad to be nominated for the score, because it’s [a recognition of] the rest of the work I have done,’ says Charest, a 2002 Gemeaux nominee for the TV doc series WOW 2. ‘It is rare to stumble onto a project so artistically creative. I hope more opportunities like this come along.’

French jazz also figures prominently in Terry Frewer’s score for Head in the Clouds, a drama about a ménage à trois (played by Charlize Theron, Penelope Cruz and Stuart Townsend) that spans decadent 1930s France, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. Frewer, based in Vancouver, says he fused pre-WWII French jazz with a more traditional, emotive score.

‘It’s a period piece, so it was clear to everybody that it needed to have a traditional orchestra and not a synthesized score,’ Frewer says. ‘There was a lot of music that fit the exuberance of the times, particularly for bohemian life in France before the war, so we used a lot of period jazz that was hot in Paris then.’

Frewer, who credits director John Duigan and editor Dominique Fortin for helping to find the right tone, drew inspiration from the scores of The Piano (composed by Michael Nyman) and The Hours (Philip Glass), both of which rely on music to convey much of their dramatic emotion.

The composer enjoyed the perks of working on a US$16-million production, adding, ‘It was a unique opportunity to work on a film with a budget for an orchestra.’

Frewer’s previous credits include the TV series The Chris Isaak Show and the one-hour doc Over Canada, which won him a 2000 Gemini Award.

Another lover of jazz, Charles Papasoff (who will tour Europe with his jazz group Papasoff this summer) opted for a more traditional score for La Lune viendra d’elle-même, a little-seen drama about a woman with a long-term illness, from first-time writer/director Marie-Jan Seille.

‘I’m basically like a medium through which the director writes the music,’ says the Montreal-based Papasoff. ‘It’s not about me – it’s about the film, and the esthetic choices are made because they are what the film calls for, not what the style in vogue is, or what the style I prefer at the moment is.’

Seille wanted a string-heavy score to capture the film’s emotional peaks and valleys, so Papasoff delivered music performed mostly by string quartet, with sections involving a larger chamber ensemble.

The composer, who produced the acoustic score without any trial demos, performed the music for Seille on piano before laying down the tracks. The lack of prerecording costs freed up budget for the production to hire the best ensemble it could find.

By contrast, on the bank-heist thriller Le Dernier tunnel, Michel Corriveau was instructed by director Eric Canuel to come up with a beat-heavy score with an industrial feel – synthesized yet somehow timeless. The composer says he enjoyed that challenge as well as the overall collaboration with the director, with whom he worked on 2003’s Nez rouge.

‘On one hand, you feel that he knows exactly where he is going with his movie – a very secure feeling for the composer – and on the other, he will give you great creative liberty, as long as the music stays in line with his vision of the movie,’ he says.

Corriveau, based in Montreal, programmed over 60 minutes of music in 30 days, drawing inspiration from the action sequences from Dirty Harry films, among others. It was the film’s final scenes that proved most difficult.

‘My father was afflicted by the same cancer one of the film’s characters had, so it was a bit weird to score the end,’ he explains.

Pierre Duchesne set out to mix electronic sensibilities with baroque music in Francis Leclerc’s Jutra-winning drama Mémoires affectives, calling on a complement of instruments including a nylon-stringed, cello-like viola da gamba.

Duchesne was previously nominated in 2001 for Une jeune fille à la fenêtre, also directed by Leclerc. These two films, in fact, are the only ones Duchesne, a Montreal music producer by trade, has ever scored.

For Mémoires, Duchesne looked deep into the story of an amnesiac (Roy Dupuis) trying to come to grips with his past life, and found something ‘religious’ in the theme, leading him to the baroque stylings.

‘Film scores are a little new for me,’ he says. ‘I think I take a different approach, because I don’t have a big background in music and film.’

The 25th annual Genie Award winners will be announced on March 21.

-www.genieawards.ca

-www.bencharest.com