A film that lurks in the darker edges of Australian cinema, Beautiful Kate centres around Ned Kendall (played by Ben Mendelsohn), his return to his Australian home in the Flinders Ranges at the request of his dying father, and the uncovering of a story that took place when Ned and his twin sister (beautiful) Kate, were 16.
The film soundtrack, composed by Australian music icon Tex Perkins and his Dark Horses band-mate Murray Paterson, is quite unlike what Tex fans will be familiar with. There is none of the bluesy grunt of the Beasts or the tongue-in-cheek irony of the Ladyboyz. Perkins’ and Paterson’s compositions are much more slow-burning and stripped-back. The vast landscape of the Australian outback provides the backdrop for the movie, and the pair’s musical vision – which weaves in the natural outback soundtrack with snippets of prose from the film – augments the haunting, isolated nature of its deserted setting.
Running throughout the soundtrack, the Beautiful Kate theme is a wistful elegy to the story, and a testament to the notion that simplicity is beautiful: the recurrent song uses no more than a single acoustic guitar, highlighted on occasion by an ethereal voice and violin, to accentuate the story’s poignancy. Meanwhile the interspersed film dialogue (“We never got a chance to talk about last summer, did we?”) and the mournful tones created in moments like Wilpena Pond or You’re Not Gonna Tell Him Are You often hint at some of the darker themes – suicide, death and incest – that recur throughout the story.
Megan Washington adds a melancholic accompaniment to Tex’s raw vocals in the Marianne Faithful song This Little Bird; a song which, along with film closer Closing Titles (Remembering Russell Dunlop), is one of the few full-length songs on the soundtrack. Tex Perkins and Murray Paterson have created the perfect complement to an emotional and moving film. Beautiful Kate may be a challenging in many ways, but the beautiful film score helps make it utterly evocative.
Beautiful Kate is out now through Shock Records.
