Face of Love (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

What if you lost the love of your life, then years later discovered his or her doppelgänger: a complete stranger? Director Arie Posin made a film by taking that premise from a childhood incident, shrewdly casting veterans Annette Bening, Ed Harris, and Robin Williams, and invoking the sensibilities of both Sirk and Hitchcock. Then he entrusted the musical score to Brazilian-born composer Marcelo Zarvos (Ray Donovan, The Big C, Brooklyn’s Finest). The director “wanted a timeless feel to the score,” Zarvos notes. “We used an orchestra with very strong thematic material that would hit the emotional, romantic, and suspenseful elements of the story. The goal of the music was to keep us guessing to the very end what was real or imaginary.” That inspired Zarvos toward elegantly spare, often modernistic piano and orchestra cues that recall not so much the fabled Herrmann/Hitchcock axis as they do the collaborations of DePalma and Donaggio; they're cast in a cool, haunting musical melancholy that's distinctly Zarvos’ own.