The Go-Between. 1971. UK. Directed by Joseph Losey. Screenplay by Harold Pinter. With Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Dominic Guard. 114 min.
Marcelos Zarvos’s insinuatingly sinister music for Todd Haynes’s latest film, May December, is a clever reworking of Michel Legrand’s own darkly romantic score for The Go-Between, providing an excuse (as if we need one) to revisit Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter’s devastating adaptation of the popular 1953 novel by L. P. Hartley. A similar foray into the perils of childhood innocence, The Go-Between is told through the eyes of a boy who becomes entangled in a love triangle (Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Edward Fox) during a summer holiday spent on his schoolmate’s lavish country estate. As Haynes observes, “[Legrand’s] score sits so upfront and ahead of and beyond the ultimate events that unfold in that particular storyline, even more extraneously than they do in May December, where there is a question of criminality and culpability—you hear that music and you think it’s going to be a crime drama, there’s going to be a murder. The audience is immediately slapped into a state of alert about where the story is leading…. The music keeps sweetening that and enforcing those questions, but with a mischievous sense that this can be a pleasurable inquisition as we watch it.”
4K digital restoration by StudioCanal.