I cannot wait to see Gone Girl . For one, it’s directed by David Fincher — that makes it an automatic must-see. Two, I’ve read the book, and its halfway twist is easily one of the best acts of rug-pulling I’ve encountered. It’s genius. The story is about grown-ups behaving very badly, and it’s also about emotional sadism — wife goes missing, husband becomes the prime suspect and is humiliated by everyone. Fincher is a perfect fit, and if there were any doubts, the first trailer, released a few months ago, blew them out of the water. (As I write this, the second trailer has just been released. That’s what reminded me of the earlier one.)
Sometime in April, I got my first glimpse of Gone Girl . The colour palette was just right. This is a dark story, almost forensic in its dissection of a marriage – it needs these sombre tones. But the song that played over the images was surprising. It was the romantic She , most famously covered by Elvis Costello. If you remember Notting Hill , it’s the number that begins to play at the end, when, at a London press conference, a reporter asks the Julia Roberts character how long she’s planning to stay, and she looks at Hugh Grant and says, “Indefinitely.”
That’s how romantic a song it is. Just look at the lyrics: “She may be the face I can’t forget, the trace of pleasure or regret, maybe my treasure or the price I have to pay / She may be the song that summer sings, may be the chill that autumn brings, may be a hundred different things, within the measure of a day / She may be the beauty or the beast, may be the famine or the feast, may turn each day into a Heaven or a Hell / She may be the mirror of my dreams, a smile reflected in a stream, she may not be what she may seem, inside her shell.”
If you’ve read Gone Girl , you have to laugh. (Mild spoiler warning till the end of this paragraph.) The words that seemed so joyous in that Notting Hill stretch now acquire a chill. Key phrases leap out — “She may be the face I can’t forget, the trace of pleasure or regret , maybe my treasure or the price I have to pay / She may be the song that summer sings, may be the chill that autumn brings , may be a hundred different things, within the measure of a day / She may be the beauty or the beast , may be the famine or the feast, may turn each day into a Heaven or a Hell / She may be the mirror of my dreams, a smile reflected in a stream, she may not be what she may seem , inside her shell.”
How different something sounds or seems when the context is changed. The song is one thing over the brightly lit rom-com images of Notting Hill ; it’s another thing entirely in Fincher’s universe.
This is how I like my trailers. You get vignettes from the film — all of them quick-cut, so there’s no chance of stumbling on a plot point. And these vignettes are fused together by a score or a song. (Even if you don’t know these lyrics, even if you don’t remember Notting Hill , it’s still a stretch of music that binds together a series of disparate images.)
There are occasional bursts of dialogue, but nothing that gives anything away. (At the end we hear the husband say, “I did not kill my wife. I am not a murderer.” But that’s just the book’s premise. In an ideal world, even this hint of what we’re in for wouldn’t be there, but I guess studios would get jittery if the trailers gave away nothing .) All we’re left with is the defining mood of the film — not plot, not performances, just mood .
Most trailers get the vignette part right but not the mood part. Case in point: the recently-released trailer for Vishal Bhardwaj’s Hamlet adaptation, Haider . This, too, is a series of images bound by a song — an angsty rock number — but it’s not seamless. It just seems to be a hodgepodge of bits from the movie. There’s no sense of something beginning, building, and subsiding — at least, it’s not organic. Guns, women, romance, drama, gangsters — it looks generic. Even the Kashmir setting doesn’t really come through. Of course, the real test of a film is the film itself. The trailer is just a warm-up. But a good trailer makes us warm up to the movie a lot more.
