If you've ever found the score of a movie intrusive or overwrought, or even overused in its means of conveying tension or romance, sit a moment with a movie like Portrait of a Lady on Fire and appreciate the silence, the absolute lack of a score. While you're there, you might want to consider its elegance, how a single frame might very well indeed be that painting. Pause the movie and notice the composition of light and shadow, how a character's skin appears as soft as a carefully made oil painting. Marvel in the simple tableau of three women preparing food, how you could frame this and hang it on a wall to study and admire. How it would've captured another painter and compelled them recreate it. Then listen to the voices, (read the fucking subtitles you philistine, fucking suffer through it if you must), appreciate the simplicity of this story, the depth of these impressively drawn characters, the tension of their longing stares, the electricity between them, of what is wanted but cannot be touched, just as you shouldn't lay a finger on a canvas in a museum. Wait for the fumbled strains from a harpsichord, the dulcet but powerful mingling of choir voices, paced by rhythmic clapping, that gives the exact emotions one should feel from a well-placed score. Let the other sounds take precedence and add richness to your viewing. While you're at it, throw all your tawdry notions of sapphic love in the fucking bin and take a moment to see this as a perfectly written, gorgeously presented love story. Disregard the genders, don't belittle it. It's a love story, don't make it stand apart from other love stories. Don't you dare call it shocking, or liberal propaganda. You cannot politicize love.
It's a beautiful movie. Accept it for what it is.
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