Mp3 Friday! A new Bitter Cinema feature.... This week: Tema de Desilusao from Garota de Ipanema (com. Antonio Carlos Jobim arr. Eumir Deodato
I hate to be using another IMDB link for a movie, but if that's all you can find.... Garota de Ipanema, or The Girl from Ipanema, was made in 1967, a sort of tie-in to the famous Bossa Nova tune by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes. I can find very little information about the film except for what you can find through the IMDB. Maybe it wasn't very good, but the soundtrack's not bad at all. The soundtrack's line-up seems like an all-star cast of Brazilian musical talent in the mid-60s: Tom Jobim, Vinicius, Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Baden Powell, Tamba Trio, Quarteto em Cy, Nara Leao. The soundtrack's been hard to find until it was recently reissued, I think in Brazil. Now I think it's out of print again.
But here's a little taste. This tune is entitled Tema de Desilusao, which means, I think, Theme of Disillusion, which is the last track of the record. The melody should be very familiar, as it's The Girl from Ipanema, but darkly colored with minor chord progressions and a somber orchestration. The melody is, of course, Jobim's, but the arrangement was by Eumir Deodato, who later scored a hit in the U.S. with his jazz-fusion take on Also Sprach Zarathustra, which we all know as the 2001 Theme. I'm assuming that the disillusion occurs when the girl from Ipanema walks away, impervious to the main character's attention. Or maybe someone gets killed in a boating accident, and life is seen as a strange folly. Disillusionment comes in many shades of gray.
As an aside, Helo Pinheiro, the actual inspiration for the original song, and has used her modicum of notoriety to some advantage, appeared recently with her daughter in a pictorial in the Brazilian edition of Playboy. Olha que coisa mais linda!