For each traumatic silence, the poetry of a song

The performance of the song Moon River in Almodóvar and Blake Edwards’s films

Abstract

In the film La mala educación (2004), by Pedro Almodóvar, one important character is the film director Enrique Goded. In the beginning of the plot, he reads the novel La Visita, written by his childhood friend Ignácio, with the intention of making a cinematographic adaptation. While Goded reads, the scenes from his future film appear. In this preview, there is a performance of the song Moon River, composed by Mancini and Mercer, as an adaptation of the scene of the sexual abuse suffered by Ignácio. The song was originally performed in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), by Blake Edwards, and reappears in the Spanish movie with modifications in the letter. With four versions of the song – which are: the version in English and the one in Spanish out of the movie, the version performed in Almodóvar’s movie and in Edwards’s movie – the objectives of this text are: 1) to analyse how the song replaces the role playing of the rape and 2) to analyse how the performances of the song in the two films bring different meanings among them and also a different meaning compared to a performance out of a movie scene. The methodology used was analysing the songs’ letter; at first separately and then in comparison to the cinematographic images. In order to do that,  the concepts of song by Luiz Tatit and Evandro Botti de Cerqueira, the concepts of performance by Ruth Finegan and also the association among poetry and image by Coleridge, Shelley and I.A. Richards were used.