Last week, the day before Halloween and to little fanfare in the states, BBC Three (which I'm told is the hip BBC for young people) broadcast the 2011 Nicolas Winding Refn film Drive with a completely different and mostly original soundtrack, curated by BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe and featuring brand new songs from acts like Chvrches, Bastille, Laura Mvula, and Foals.
"But Drive already had the best soundtrack ever!" Yes, okay, I agree, but also shut up for a second. First of all, this is largely unprecedented: A movie might come out with a couple of soundtrack albums (I'm thinking Prince's nutbar contribution to Tim Burton's Batman), and you occasionally see some covers in relation to a big 3D rerelease (like The Nightmare Before Christmas followup Nightmare Revisited), but this is something new. These are new songs, inserted organically into an otherwise identically cut film, all with the blessing of the filmmaker.
So your next question is probably "Is it a better soundtrack?" The answer: a firm "No." If your primary concern here is watching the "definitive" version of Drive, well, you already have, and I just saved you some time. HOWEVER: if you want to get a little film wonky with me, continue beyond the jump.
So my first pass at writing this up was super catty, on a level you might associate with a Star Wars purist reviewing the Star Wars Holiday Special. This new version of Drive just felt wrong, and that wrongness was threatening to me. But then I took a step back and reevaluated how I felt about it, because at the end of the day I like to think of myself as a generally positive person (for a film critic). So let's look at the BBC Three Drive as a way to explore why the original Drive works so well.
What mostly stood out to me was how unstuck in time Drive is. The locations are mostly Old LA (which is to say dingy mid-century motels, diners, and apartment buildings). The cars are either vintage Detroit muscle or modern fiberglass banality. The characters are a mix of neo-noir tropes and '80s action clichés, albeit filtered through Refn's hyper-intense, jarringly clinical sensibilities. The original soundtrack follows suit, consisting of Cliff Martinez's contemporary electronica score with an intentionally retro vibe and a single deep cut from a 1970s Italian exploitation flick.
The rescore, which employs more "of the moment" bands, can't help but anchor the film to the contemporary. The scoring is also more emotive and present. For example, in Refn's version, there's no music accompanying the film's post-heist car chase—it's just tires and engines and car horns. In the BBC version, there's this pumping, high-tempo, drum-and-bass bit. It makes sense, in that the conventional wisdom is that a soundtrack exists to amplify what's on screen—but the absence of stuff like that in the original reveals just how much confidence Refn has in his material.
The problem is that Drive has a pretty straightforward plot (boy meets girl, gangsters show up, REVENGE), and the twist is that it's played all crooked. Because there are so few cinematic cues about how to feel, this comes off as a compelling journey through the unknown. With more conventional trappings, it's hard not to read it like just another action movie. If there's a point to Ryan Gosling's borderline autistic performance, it's that your average action hero would have to be more than a little emotionally insensitive to murder a bunch of people in fairly quick succession.
If there's a substitution that works best, it's the opening credits. The original Drive features "Nightcall" by French artist Kavinsky. It's got the sort of pulsing, sinewy, neon feel of a Michael Mann film, but overlaid with a guy barking into a Cylon vocoder. It's simultaneously cool and extremely weird. The Chvrches track "Get Away" works just as well, and it's tailored exactly beat for beat to the establishing shots of the lush LA night skyline. It's not as off-putting as Kavinsky, but starting things off on a more upbeat tempo certainly gets things moving.
It's easy to be threatened by new versions of things we like, but the BBC's experiment is just that: an experiment. The closest recent example I can think of would be Steven Soderbergh's black-and-white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. No one (except for obnoxious cinephiles) is suggesting that this is the ideal way to watch Raiders, but at the same time, editorial riffs like this can be extremely informative.
Drive is one of my favorite films of the last few years, and watching this version of the film was ultimately an enjoyable experience. Refn is a director that gives very little away on first viewing, and this remix experiment sheds a lot of light on the choices he made for the soundtrack, and how soundtracks in general can affect the feel of a movie. I wouldn't call it the definitive version, but it's worth checking out if you get the chance. (If you're in the UK, you're in luck. Otherwise, get creative.)
