Amanda Brown scored Babyteeth like a body that knows it is running out of time

The pulse is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of broken, but wrong in the sense of irregular, skipping, slightly too fast and then slightly too slow, as though the heart producing it cannot decide between urgency and exhaustion. Amanda Brown’s score for Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2019) opens with a string figure that does this: it establishes a rhythmic pattern and then deviates from it within the first four bars. The deviation is small. A held note where a short one was expected. A rest that arrives a beat early. The ear registers it as unease before the mind identifies it as technique, and that sequence, body first, analysis second, is the operating principle of the entire score.

Babyteeth is a film about a girl who is dying. Milla (Eliza Scanlen) has cancer. She is sixteen. She falls in love with Moses (Toby Wallace), a petty drug dealer who is older and chaotic and wrong for her in every way that parents and oncologists can identify and right for her in the one way that matters: he makes her feel alive at a time when the alternative is approaching at speed. The film, Murphy’s feature debut, refuses to treat this situation as tragedy. It treats it as comedy, as chaos, as a series of domestic detonations set off by a family that is falling apart and holding together simultaneously. The tone is wild, unpredictable, swinging between tenderness and farce with a recklessness that mirrors Milla’s own refusal to be careful with the time she has left.

The score has to hold all of this without collapsing into any single register, and it does.

Strings that breathe

Brown writes for strings, primarily, but the strings in Babyteeth do not behave the way film strings typically behave. They do not swell. They do not sustain beneath the emotional peaks to tell the audience what to feel. Instead, they breathe. The bowing is light, intermittent, textural rather than melodic. The strings enter and withdraw in phrases that last only a few seconds, as though they are checking in on the film rather than accompanying it. The effect is of a musical presence that is attentive but not insistent, watching from the next room, close enough to hear but not so close as to intrude.

This restraint is structural, not decorative. Murphy’s film is saturated with pre-existing music: pop songs, classical pieces, the sonic detritus of a household where the father (Ben Mendelsohn) plays piano and the mother (Essie Davis) plays everything loud. The score has to coexist with this material without competing with it, and Brown solves the problem by writing music that occupies a different frequency range and a different emotional register from the source cues. The pop songs are bright, present, socially located. The score is interior, private, happening in the space between what the characters are doing and what they are feeling.

The Go-Between in the orchestra

Amanda Brown was, before she was a film composer, a member of the Go-Betweens. She played violin, oboe, guitar. Her contribution to the band was the element that separated them from every other guitar-pop group working in Brisbane in the 1980s: a melodic sensibility that was classical in its training and pop in its instincts, capable of writing lines that sounded simple and revealed their complexity only on the third or fourth listen. That sensibility carries directly into her scoring work.

The Babyteeth score has a pop musician’s understanding of economy. The cues are short. The ideas are small, a three-note figure, a rhythmic cell, a harmonic interval, and they do their work quickly because Brown knows, the way a songwriter knows, that the listener’s attention is finite and the most effective musical gesture is the one that arrives, registers, and leaves before it has time to become furniture. There are no extended orchestral passages. There are no themes that develop over the course of the film in the way that conventional film scoring develops themes. Instead there are fragments, each one precise, each one calibrated to the specific emotional temperature of the scene it accompanies, and the cumulative effect is of a score that mirrors the film’s own structure: episodic, impulsive, held together not by narrative logic but by the emotional coherence of a life being lived at speed.

The body of the score

The connection to Scanlen’s Milla is physical. Milla’s body is the site of the film’s central tension: it is the body that is sick, the body that desires, the body that dances at a party and vomits in a bathroom and lies in a hospital bed and presses itself against Moses in a hallway. The score tracks this body. When Milla is in motion, the rhythms quicken, the intervals widen, the strings take on a brightness that registers as adrenaline. When Milla is still, the music slows, thins, becomes a single held note or a pair of notes rubbing against each other in a dissonance so gentle it barely qualifies as tension.

Brown scores the illness not as a condition but as a rhythm. The cancer is not represented musically by darkness or minor keys or any of the conventional signifiers of suffering. It is represented by irregularity: the skipped beat, the phrase that does not resolve, the rest that comes too soon. Milla’s body is losing its ability to keep time, and the score loses its ability to keep time with her, and the correspondence between the medical and the musical is never stated but always felt. The pulse is wrong because the body is wrong, and the beauty of the score is that the wrongness is also a form of expression, a rhythm that belongs to Milla alone, that no healthy body would produce and no conventional score would permit.

What the score does not do

It does not console. This is the most important thing about Brown’s work on Babyteeth, and it is the quality that separates it from the scores of other Australian films about illness and death. There is no musical promise that everything will be all right. There is no harmonic resolution that tells the audience the suffering has meaning. The score accompanies Milla’s life the way a heartbeat accompanies a body: not because it has something to say about the body’s condition, but because it is the body’s condition, and when the body stops, the music stops, and the silence that follows is not dramatic. It is physiological.

Murphy understood this. She gave Brown the space to score the film from inside Milla’s nervous system rather than from above it, and the result is a score that does not observe its subject but inhabits her. The strings breathe because Milla breathes. The rhythms falter because Milla’s body falters. The music is short because the time is short, and the brevity of each cue, the way it arrives and departs before you can fully hold it, is its own statement about what it means to be sixteen and sick and in love and running out of measures.