The train curved up through the hills, diesel engines a distant busy hum against the gradient. Sitting in carriage three of four, we passed the outer suburban flatlands of Bunnings- and Kmart-encircled Melton, where the houses sit on volcanic rock and reverberate. Tom was reading Shirley Jackson; the short stories, not the one about the castle. I was dozing. The train slid through the Bacchus Marsh valley and tilted up again towards Gordon.
We were travelling to the Regent cinema in Ballarat where Était une Fois: Michel Legrand was screening, its short season having already finished in Melbourne.
I woke when the train pulled into the nineteenth-century station, tall enough to allow dispersal of the cindery engine smoke that once filled its cavernous interior, which was now drenched in shade.
We walked the few hundred metres to the cinema, where only a handful of seats were occupied. In two screen hours, Michel Legrand grew from a child abandoned by his musician father to legendary French composer, jazz pianist, film scorer, and petulant conductor. If you've seen Jacques Demy's film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg you will have an idea of the jazzy, carefree, confident, innocent, even inconsequential - but utterly joyful - music Legrand composed to underscore that movie and other early 1960s French musicals.
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The previous week I had glanced at one of those top one-hundred lists compiled to publicise cinema or music magazines, or because the compiler had nothing better to do. I should know, I made one a few years ago when I - almost literally - had nothing else to do. My list, put together in the cabin-fever-induced madness of compulsory solitude mixed insanely with enforced crowdedness, ranked a hundred songs of the twentieth century based on significance to me, if not to anyone else.
The number three song on that list was The Windmills of Your Mind, a song of unrestrained metaphor that tapped into the psychedelic tone of the late 1960s. The music, written by Michel Legrand as the theme song for 1968's The Thomas Crowne Affair, created a kind of audio parallax effect via a series of stepped rising and falling inflections, enhancing - or confirming - the song's journey through the emotional hills and valleys of lost love.
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When you knew that it was over you were suddenly aware/that the autumn leaves were turning to the colour of her hair …
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