The Unearthly Mildewy Music Of Cape Verde S Os Tubaroes

• Horse Money

Every once in a while I’ll see a movie in which the use of a piece of music leaves me floored: the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” in Mean Streets, New Order’s “Dreams Never End” in Carlos, or, hell, all of the music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Such a thing happened to me last Friday, when I saw Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa’s latest film, the hypnotic and slow-moving Horse Money, at the Gene Siskel Film Center. As Ben Sachs appropriately writes in his capsule review: “Painterly and meditative in Costa’s singular manner, this 2014 feature reconfigures traumatic episodes, both personal and historical, into a waking dream.” The film rarely features any music of any kind, but in one pivotal scene, a strange, elegant song appears as if out of the ether. Afterwards, I made sure to do some online searching when I got home to identify the song, and eventually discovered that it’s called “Alto Cutelo,” made by a band from Cape Verde called Os Tubaroes.