A 4D Soundtrack: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Music tells stories. Every song sparks flashbacks. Some tunes set a mood, some lyrics stir our feelings, some rhythms rock our hips. In the film industry, combining original score with memorable songs is a delicate craft. It is for gifted people, that have listened to lots of music from diverse genres and cultures; people with a supernatural sense for pairing melodies with scenes, building tension, releasing frantic chases, moving audiences to tears and plucking the strings of the human heart.

The multi-awarded music supervisor Jen Malone (Euphoria, John Wick 4, Clickbait) made a fine work assembling a four-dimensional soundtrack for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the winner of two primetime Emmy awards and nominated for other 77 awards. The show was written, produced and directed by American-Salvadorian producer/writer Francesca Sloan along with Donald Glover, also lead actor and a musician with the stage name of Childish Gambino.

The first season has a solid 91% in Rotten Tomatoes, the second season was confirmed in May 2024, and it is very exciting the prospect of a new leading couple: Mark Eydelshteyn and Billie Eilish (!).

Composer David Fleming (The last of us; Americana; Damsel) prepared the original score with the producers’ assignment of making it exciting, crazy and offbeat. Filmed in breathtaking locations in New York, Veneto, Lake Como and Colfosco, the series abound in fast-paced action, visual gags, serious fight choreography and deadpan humour lines. Grasping all these layers is difficult but also explains the richness and complexity of every part. Have a taste with “domestic bliss no. 1”.

The original score works as a central pulse, a beacon signalling the path back home. However, much of the series success is, in my view, a result of the breadth and depth of the soundtrack. An artist list with Patsy Kline, Darude, Tokisha, Mina Mazzini, Juan Luis Guerra, L.T.O., Trio Lescano and Bonnie Banane is intertextual: brings sensations and memories attached to different events from the viewer’s own experience to charge the peak emotions propelling the storyline. It also reveals the unsettling presence of, either a music lover with encyclopaedic mind, or an ensemble of characters in musical production. Eclectic, you may say, but each fragment suits perfectly the pace and proceedings in the foreground.

Each pick is in itself a piece of (musical) history. When we enjoy the harmonics in “Tornerai”, from Trio Lescano, we cannot suspect that the female vocal group of Hungarian-Duch sisters that sang in German and Italian, were cheering the top war command from 1936 to 1946.

When the axis was going south, they did the same, relaunching their career in South American circuits, taking stock of the post-war immigration waves from Germany, Italy, Poland and Hungary. They continued to live most of their lives in Venezuela, which back in fifties, was the fourth wealthiest nation in the world. It is a story with so many twists and mysteries, that needs their own series, their own soundtrack, or at least, a note of their own in OranshNote®.