Julie & Julia (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Julie & Julia, based on a pair of true stories, tells the tales of women who transform their lives (and marriages) with their culinary activities. One story, set in France in the ‘40s and ’50s, follows Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) as she develops the skills she would later use to introduce French cooking to American housewives. The second story, which takes place in New York in the post-9/11 era, portrays Julie Powell (Amy Adams) as she blogs about her attempts to cook every recipe in Childs’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Composer Alexandre Desplat has created scores for numerous French films and American features such as Syriana and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and is expert at utilizing the musical idioms of both countries in his work, incorporating pop, jazz, musette, and other flavors into this appealingly light score. The soundtrack also includes Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” Charles Aznavour’s “Mes emmerdes,” and Doris Day’s “A Bushel and a Peck.” Things wrap up with Margaret Whiting intoning the old Sammy Cahn/Jule Styne tune, “Time After Time.”