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MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE is a semiautobiographical animated musical created by Signe Baumane, who takes a strong feminist look at the ridiculous complexity of the silly human condition we call love. Baumane’s fantastic use of four different styles of animation, paired with an earnest view of societal expectations and pressures placed on women entering into the institution of matrimony, will have you questioning your own affair with marriage.
The film follows Zelma on her 23-year quest for perfect love and lasting marriage set against a backdrop of historic events in Eastern Europe. The film, conveyed from a woman’s point of view, blends historical, biological, societal, and emotional arcs with a lively sense of humor and musical numbers. This animated film for adults tackles the issues of love, gender norms, domestic violence, fantasies, and toxic relationships to propel a woman’s journey toward independence and liberation.
Film composer, pianist, flutist, and music producer Kristian Sensini’s credits include Baumane’s award-winning animated feature films MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE and ROCKS IN MY POCKETS, for which he received the Colonne Sonor Award for “Best Soundtrack,” Domiziano Cristopharo’s Hyde’s SECRET NIGHTMARE, for which he received a Global Music Award for “Best Original Score,” Rai 1’s series THE TEACHER, which he composed alongside Pino Donaggio and Paolo Vivaldi; Chi Lee’s mystery/thriller THE FROG IN THE STONE; Andrej Kosak’s DRAMA ALL AGAINST ALL (Vsi Proti Vsem); and many more.
Q: I understand this hand-drawn animated production project took seven years to complete. How did you become involved in the project, and how did you create the music for the film across that lengthy-time period?
Kristian Sensini: I did my first movie for Signe Baumane in 2014. It was called ROCKS IN MY POCKETS, an animated film. When Signe had the opportunity to do a second animated movie, MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE, she called me immediately because we had worked very well together on the first one. We understood each other, and it was precious to collaborate with a director over the years. We’ve kept in contact each year since the first movie, and as soon as she brought me on board for the second movie, I have been involved since the pre-production phase.
The first thing I did for her in this second movie was to write a demo song. In the script, Signe wrote many lyrics intended to be a sort of Greek chorus for the film’s main character, which is Biology. I wrote the first song for Signe as a demo, and she liked it. So, for these seven years, I have written every single song in this movie, which Signe needed in advance because there are characters who sing, and she needed to create the lip-sync for every one in the animation. It was working on the movie without seeing it – just from reading the script and hearing the voice acting from some of the actors. The film is a musical, but not in the Disney style.
These songs’ color palettes range from jazz to rhythm and blues, gospel, and even more chamber-like pieces. The style needed to adapt to the various “incarnations” of the three Mythology Sirens, who are singing characters who serve as a sort of “social” conscience for the protagonist. Since it is a story that unfolds through the growth of the female protagonist, I chose orchestrations that also reflected the girl’s development. Those songs were the first musical layer. We composed and recorded them before the director started animating because she needed them as a reference to create a believable lip sync. The film is a musical, but there are also documentary-like parts in which the protagonist is Biology itself, explaining the reasons for human actions, especially in the field of love, based on scientific explanations. This part required a lot of work because, after many auditions, we couldn’t find the right key to accompany these scenes. The director didn’t want them to sound like “scientific documentary” music. The intuition was to interpret the music not from the point of view of the viewer who is watching Biology explain but from the point of view of Biology itself, which is a primitive being. Signe was very clear that she didn’t want documentary music. We tried lots of things, and when I started to work on the score after the songs were finished, I had a tough time because I did ten or twelve different demos for the Biology character – just for the first Biology cue – and no single one of them was okay for Signe! I was scared that I might have lost the connection with the director or lost my touch, and then we had a discussion, and Signe suggested we use just the percussion for those cues.
That was a strange request; percussion is usually used in movies to express fear or rage, but not something romantic. That was a good experimentation because Signe really has a musical sensibility, but she’s not a musician. She’s nervous regarding the music, so every idea she has is out of the box. When I hear ideas like that, I jump in immediately because writing all those kinds of cues and expressing all these feelings using percussion was challenging. Still, in the end, it was the most original thing about the score, in my opinion. So the choice fell on percussion, and all the scenes dedicated to Biology were scored using only percussion – all kinds from all over the world. The challenge was to avoid being repetitive and to characterize each cue differently. We tried to introduce as many percussion instruments as possible and to solve even very difficult questions, such as how to express concepts such as fear, love, doubt, irony, anger, and attachment, using only percussion. It was an incredible challenge, but we achieved remarkable results.
Q: Would you describe a bit about what this film is about and what, to your understanding, the director’s goals were in creating a film that is so powerfully musically intensive?
Kristian Sensini: Signe’s movies are autobiographical. As with the first movie, MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE was a delicate matter because we’re creating a musical environment for stories but they are not fantasy stories – they are true stories of Signe’s life. That first movie was even more difficult – it was about an account of the depression and suicide of a woman in Signe’s family. The leading voice-over in the first movie was Signe herself, telling the story. In this second movie, the story is not so much about the failure of a marriage, but how we work from a biological point of view… how love works from the perspective of chemistry and biology. The exciting thing was creating an emotional score involving the audience. Still, from a certain point of view, this is also a documentary about the biology of love. It was clear from Signe that she didn’t want documentary music; she didn’t want music without character. She wanted the emotive involvement of the audience in this movie. The mandate was to have two different points of view – the one of the documentary and the one of a more classical score. It was challenging to use the documentary language, but with the stronger emotive configuration, I found an exciting way to write the music.
Q: How would you describe your musical instrumentation for the score?
Kristian Sensini: I have been into chamber music for five or six years. Every composer wants to write for a big orchestra because you’re standing in front of all those amazing musicians, and you have a lot of possibilities with an orchestra. But, it’s to write for an orchestra – not that I am saying this, these are the words of Conrad Pope, the orchestrator for John Williams, Alan Silvestri, Alexandre Desplat, who once said in Vienna “It’s easy to write for an orchestra because we have so many instruments you can use. Having just a few instruments and making them sound bigger is difficult.” So my main goal, for about ten years now, is to write music for small ensembles and find solutions to make them sound more prominent. To sound as if they were double the size of the orchestra.
So, in this movie, I used at most five instruments simultaneously. The goal was to use some orchestration techniques to make them sound larger. The idea was to use sort of jazzy/folk ideas, A lot of cues are from elements that could be extended for a jazz ensemble, but they are not because we’re using the folk elements in the harmony and the melody, but the approach was jazzy. Let’s remember that this is also a musical, so we wanted to do a musical with a jazzy attitude but also with the folk elements. Signe didn’t wish to create a classical musical with all those big band jazz numbers, and she didn’t want a Disney musical; she wanted a musical where the narration is kept minimal by the song. We had a small ensemble for the songs and kept the story and the dancing from distracting the audience. Every single cue is functional for telling the story.
MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE is a film that surprises its audience and is very different from much of the mainstream animation offered on the platforms. It is an animated film but for adults. It is difficult to explain every time because we still live with the prejudice that animation is a genre of film for children and teenagers, while in reality, it is a medium for telling stories. The very last thing I wrote was the final song. For the songs within the film, I relied entirely on the texts composed by the director, without touching a single word and even creating very special songs because the initial texts had in some cases the free form of contemporary poetry. For the end credits, the director asked me for a more pop composition. After reading the song’s first draft, I asked the director to make some changes to the structure because we know that contemporary pop songs require a specific design in their form. In this case, the instrumentation is similar to the songs we can hear on the charts, and the text is powerful, summarizing the film’s central themes in a few words. The song was performed by Storma Large, a great singer who has sung a lot with Pink Martini. A particular note is that in some cases I found myself writing the music literally around the voices of the actors who gave great performances, among them I like to remember Matthew Modine (STRANGER THINGS. FULL METAL JACKET), Dagmara Dominczyk (SUCCESSION), Cameron Monaghan (GOTHAM), Stephen Lang (AVATAR).”
Q: What was most challenging for you about this project and most rewarding?
Kristian Sensini: What’s most challenging is that every movie by Signe is full of voice-over, wall-to-wall! There is the narrator and characters who speak from the start to the end of the movie! It’s often a nightmare for a composer to write under a voice-over. We don’t want to distract the audience; you don’t want to mess with the acting of the voices. In the first movie, we have just one voice, Signe’s, from start to finish. It was easy because when you find the correct frequencies of the voice-over, you can write music under or over those frequencies and use their voice-over as a sort of melody. So when you have just one voice, it’s easy to avoid those frequencies and go on. In this case, we had many actors with many different voices; we had female voices and much deeper male voices, and it was a different kind of work. You had to be influenced by those frequencies, but you’re not allowed to use the same frequencies in every single cue.
I used this voice-over as the main melody that guided and held all the percussion instruments together. The last layer that makes up the film’s music is the score. In this case, we were more traditional and used classical instruments in a chamber music context, especially strings, harp, piano, and a flute. In this way, we obtained a very varied film from a musical point of view. It embraces many styles and many types of orchestration, and for this reason, it tends to surprise. I hope to create a fitting counterpoint to images that are themselves surprising and produced by one of the most brilliant artists of contemporary animation.
The more rewarding thing was to be able to write a lot of songs. I’m usually not a songwriter; I’m mostly a composer, but I also like to write songs occasionally. I never did that for a movie until now, and writing all those little songs was rewarding because they were in many different styles. We have something more in the fantasy style, more jazzy, and more rhythm and blues. There are a couple of little gospel songs, so it was a different score because there are a lot of different styles of music in the score.
Special thanks to Kristian Sensini for taking the time to discuss his work on this film in detail and to Alix Becq-Weinstein and Jana Davidoff with Rhapsody PR for facilitating this interview.
The soundtrack album from MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH MARRIAGE is now available from MovieScoreMedia.
