NYFOS Sings Brel & Trenet

Charles Trenet

Each time I attend a concert of New York Festival of Song, I am uplifted. Artistic director Steven Blier builds programs around themes that are always intriguing, and his eclectic tastes are impeccable: yes, he likes all kinds of songs, but only the good ones. He’s also got a knack for selecting fresh talent, often before I’ve heard them sing much if ever, so a big part of the uplift is the simple optimism that other concerts, in other venues, will be satisfying, too. After all, as an impresario, accompanist, and teacher, Blier is among the most significant forces that have revolutionized recital programs in America over the past few decades: it is now standard for sets and entire performances to be organized around themes, and the repertoire has expanded far beyond art songs and arias.

Last night’s performance of songs by Jacques Brel and Charles Trenet provided eloquent, abundant proof of the qualities I admire in NYFOS programs. Even in the work of two songwriters I know well, Blier found numbers unfamiliar to me, and I’d never thought of pairing the angry Belgian with the sunny Frenchman: the combination shed new light on both. To lend authentic flavor to the proceedings, Blier invited two top-notch musicians, guitarist Greg Utzig and accordionist Bill Schimmel (who’s also one of the leading exponents of Weill’s music). With two native-French singers of exceptional charm, it was a memorable evening all around.

Jacques Brel

Indeed, mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand was so brilliant that one almost regretted that this wasn’t a solo recital — contravention though that would be of the NYFOS philosophy that it’s better to share the music (with each other, with the audience, with the world). Pert and pretty, funny as hell, Lenormand fully inhabited the dramatic situation of each song, and she expertly negotiated the vocal distinctions between chanteuse and cantatrice. Moreover, the woman knows how to work a crowd. We were at her mercy, and we loved her for it.

Singing opposite her, the young tenor Philippe Pierce, a graduate of Brown University (go, Bruins!), would have been justified in boasting if he’d merely avoided letting Lenormand mop up the floor with him, but he managed to hold his own and to shine, notably in the opening number, Brel’s “Valse à mille temps,” with its accelerated tempos and tongue-twisting lyrics. Pierce sailed confidently through. Since Trenet was approximately a baritenor and Brel decidedly a baritone (who played the lead in Man of La Mancha, by no means a tenor role), it must be said that, generally, I’d have preferred a darker voice in this music, but Pierce’s linguistic skill and aforementioned charm did offer valuable compensations.

Tenor Philippe Pierce

In Blier’s piano accompaniment, he showed generosity to the young singers but didn’t mollycoddle them; throughout the evening, his affection for this music was audible and infectious. In his arrangements, he did better by those numbers in which Utzig played banjo (creating the perfect atmosphere) than by those in which the indisputably accomplished Utzig played electric guitar, which unbalanced the acoustic and didn’t contribute much that seemed truly necessary. (It seemed mostly a kind of sonic filler.) Schimmel’s accordion, however, was right on the mark, and he plays so well that one forgets how badly other people play. Even watching him is a pleasure, like watching a great dancer.

This music is important to me, in ways that transcend aesthetic considerations, and Trenet’s songs in particular hearken to summers by the sea and to the spirit that guided so many of my explorations of France and its culture. (After all, when you speak a childish French, and when everything is new to you, you do acquire a youthful, Trenet-esque exuberance, even if you’re not a kid anymore.) To be honest, since the death of my mother-in-law last month, I’ve not had the heart to listen to Trenet or to Brel, and some of their songs can wring wracking sobs from me even on a good day. I managed to hold it together through Brel’s “La chanson des vieux amants” and “Ne me quitte pas” and Trenet’s “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?” and “La mer,” not through any lack of commitment on the part of the musicians but through sheer willpower on my own.

The Indispensable Steven Blier

The real surprise was a Trenet song, “J’ai mordu dans le fruit de la vie” (I’ve bitten into the fruit of life), which I had always supposed was one of those rosily nostalgic-slash-congratulatory numbers with which Trenet, in old age, pandered to little old ladies in his audience. Au contraire, as Blier pointed out in his introduction, it’s nearly a confession of Trenet’s homosexuality — precisely the kind of song I hoped for but didn’t find in “Tu me manques, Johnny” (about which I wrote here). Trenet was the Gypsy Rose Lee of French pop music when it came to revealing his true self, and excepting songs about his childhood, he seldom removed so much as a metaphorical eight-button glove, but Blier made a persuasive case for this song as a personal statement, and Pierce sang it with sincere but gently restrained feeling.

NYFOS’ next concert, “Song of the Midnight Sun,” will be March 12 at Merkin Hall, and features Caramoor’s 2013 Terrance W. Schwab Vocal Rising Stars in music of Scandinavian composers, with Blier and NYFOS’ associate artistic director (and the Caramoor Center’s current artistic advisor and former CEO and general director) Michael Barrett on piano. For information and tickets, click here.

Meanwhile, I have a new mezzo to worship.
Mesdames et messieurs, Marie Lenormand.
(I’d heard her before, notably as the Fox in Houston Grand Opera’s production of Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince, but she surpassed all expectations last night.)

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Le Retour de Johnny

For hardcore fans — roughly 99.44 percent of the French-speaking world, according to my unofficial estimate — there’s a special sweetness to Johnny Hallyday’s comeback, now underway. That’s because it’s not only a professional comeback (four years ago, the singer announced that he would stop touring) but also a physical and perhaps even a spiritual comeback. Hallyday’s health problems in 2009 brought him to death’s door — and to a Los Angeles hospital, where he received treatment superior to that which he got in France.* (He’s suing his French doctor.) France has been forced to confront the mortality of its favorite idol, and everyone is now resolved to make the most of him, while he’s still around. Carpe Hallydiem.


To put it mildly, Hallyday is a cultural phenomenon with few rivals. His blue-eyed, lupine gaze surveys the entire nation from the vantage of photos on café walls; he turns up in television advertising and major motion pictures; and his voice is never farther than the nearest radio. His concerts sell out France’s largest stadiums. His every move and utterance are faithfully recorded by the press, and his comeback has been reported exhaustively on TV news programs and celebrated in an evening-length variety show in prime time last month.

And yet Johnny Hallyday is virtually unknown outside France. He’s often described as “the French Elvis,” and aptly so: he popularized rock’n’roll in France, and much of his early career, especially, was slavishly patterned after the King’s. (It’s not by accident that Hallyday assiduously cultivates ties to the U.S., wearing cowboy gear, riding a Harley Davidson, and keeping a home in California, as few other Frenchmen would dream of doing.) But global fame — or anything like Elvis’ international stature — eludes him.

Hallyday can be quite a good actor. He’s seen here with the great Jean Rochefort, in Patrice Leconte’s wistful, quirky bromance,
L’Homme du train (2003).

One excellent guide to understanding Johnny Hallyday came in a neat little film, released in 2006: Laurent Tuel’s Jean-Philippe. In that picture, a fan (Fabrice Luchini) wakes in a nightmare universe where Jean-Philippe Smet never became Johnny Hallyday. The fan thereupon takes it upon himself to seek out Smet and to train and guide him to become the superstar he was meant to be.**

Of course, most people outside France live in that universe where Hallyday isn’t a superstar. But look around Luchini’s shrine to Johnny in that movie — the memorabilia fills an entire room — or look at the new animated cartoon, Titeuf, in which Hallyday portrays himself, more or less, acting as a spiritual guide to the title character, a scrappy schoolboy. Many, many French people are absolutely religious about this man.

Jean-Philippe: Luchini in his Johnny shrine

Even those of us who are ordinarily indifferent to him (or, like me, largely ignorant of his work) must feel a little thrill these days when we hear his vibrant, somewhat nasal baritone. Unlike most other French artists, Hallyday sings à pleine voix, a hard-rocking roar that, more than ever, speaks of and to an irrepressible vitality in the French spirit.

If Johnny Hallyday’s return to the stage isn’t quite the Second Coming, it’s a sufficiently miraculous resurrection in the eyes of the faithful — just in time for Easter.

With Titeuf, on the big screen (in 3-D)
Titeuf is the hero of an immensely popular series of comic books
and star of an animated TV show, as well.

*NOTE: I hesitated to mention Hallyday’s experience with French and American doctors, because some of my relatives are going to throw it in my face the next time they want to talk about health care. But journalistic integrity wins out.

**In real life, Luchini is a serious Johnny fan who’s apparently memorized every one of Hallyday’s songs. Luchini — one of my favorite actors — generally comes across as something of a hyperactive bunny rabbit, so it’s quite entertaining to watch him mimic his idol.

BONUS PICTURE:
Hallyday at the start of his career, around 1960.
More recent efforts to stay hip and to look like an American rocker include
an extensive leather wardrobe and some pretty freaky tattoos.

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La Nostalgie: Dead Poet Societies

“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be,” as Simone Signoret observed in the title of her (wonderful) memoir. What strikes me is how much nostalgia depends on who’s around to feel it.

Brassens: Un copain d’abord
He described himself as “Le pornographe du phonographe, le polisson de la chanson,” but really, his songs aren’t dirty.

For instance, France is now commemorating the 30th anniversary of the death of Georges Brassens, a sly and gifted songwriter about whom I’ll write more, one of these days. We just finished an exhaustive series of tributes to another songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg, who died 20 years ago and who has been the subject of countless “Un an déjà,” “Dix ans déjà” and “Quinze ans déjà” retrospectives. Among the tributes to Brassens is an exhibition at the Cité de la Musique in Paris, co-curated by Joann Sfar, who made last year’s fever-dream biopic, Gainsbourg, vie héroïque.

Gainsbourg: Vingt ans déjà
His songs can get pretty raunchy sometimes.

Poor Charles Trenet had the bad luck to die exactly 10 years after Gainbsbourg, and moreover, he died an old man. Many of his fans were hardly younger than he, and by now they’ve followed him to the Great Beyond, whereas Gainsbourg died young, with an even younger fan base. And so, on the anniversary of Trenet’s death, you didn’t see a single TV report or magazine cover to commemorate him. I’d like to do my part to correct that omission, and I encourage you to follow the links above to other articles I’ve written about him.

Le vieux chantant: Trenet in old age

The other night, I caught a nostalgia-tinted documentary series with an unfortunate title, something like “50 Years That Changed the Way We Live” — as if any half-century would not have meant change. But in looking back at these developments in France, I was surprised to see how many have become part of my life; some of them, I witnessed more or less from the get-go. In the next few entries, I’ll examine these extraordinary phenomena: shopping malls, bank cards, and the legendary Minitel.

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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Just good friends? Cary Grant and Randolph Scott

Answering the question “Where did I come from” is fundamental to answering the question “Who am I,” and the impulse to trace one’s roots is as natural and as ancient as all those innumerable myths in which the young boy seeks and finds the lost sword of his dead father. (Usually under or in a rock.) Once he’s got it, he becomes a man, and he can rise to his heroic destiny. No wonder Freud found these stories so exciting.

Among minority groups, the impulse is especially strong: we have been denied so much of our heritage, we hunger to take it up. Yet we can’t, as others can, simply refer to a single chart in a library to identify our ancestors. We have to engage in the kind of passionate detective work exemplified by Alex Haley’s search for Kunta Kinte, before we can answer the question of our origins.

For homosexuals, the quest is complicated by the limited role of biology in our ancestry: for our people are not necessarily our families. Indeed, one reason gays of my generation and older seek out this alternative genealogy is that so many of us have been excluded, one way or another, by our families. We create our own communities, families of affinity and not of blood, and the forebears we seek are seldom our relatives.

From Berlin’s Schwules Museum

We can’t be guided by family resemblance: James Baldwin looked nothing like me, yet we’re both Frenchified American gay writers. We can’t refer to records, because the documents were coded, hidden or destroyed, or bequeathed to straight people who didn’t understand their worth. Much of our genealogical study therefore takes the form of gossip and guesswork, reading between lines.

These thoughts come to mind because a Charles Trenet appreciation society on Facebook posted a video clip of Trenet in old age, singing a nostalgic number in tribute to Johnny Hess.

When both men were in their teens, they made their debut as a duo, singing close harmony to piano accompaniment. This was the dominant style in France in 1936, though in only a few years, and largely as a result of Trenet’s and Hess’ solo acts, swing would overtake the popular imagination. The team of “Charles et Johnny” met with success, however, and the act broke up only because Trenet was called up for national service.

Such nice boys! Charles and Johnny

Both because of their photos (Johnny’s lips alone are incitement to debauchery) and their harmonizing duets (sweet, almost unbearably fey), there is a widespread tendency to believe that Charles and Johnny were lovers. We know that they lived together; we know, too, that Trenet was gay. During the Occupation, fear of reprisals for his sexuality led Trenet not to collaborate but to cooperate in ways to which more heroic or more hetero performers would not have submitted; in the 1960s, he was jailed on morals charges.

But Trenet was never a standard-bearer for gay rights. His solo career as a young man is marked by an exuberant baritone voice, and the objects of his love songs are always women. (Including his mother, to whom he was especially devoted.) While there was an element of androgyny in his presentation, it was naïve, youthful, and poetic, but not deviant. As a contemporary observed of him, he was like the classroom cut-up in Sunday school, a basically good boy with a sometimes-naughty sense of fun.

France’s favorite funny uncle:
Trenet in late career

By the time he wrote “Tu me manques, Johnny” (I miss you, Johnny), Trenet was fully invested in the public persona of a kindly old uncle, quirkily out of step with the times but still pretty good company. Most of his late-period songs are nostalgic catalogues of the world of his youth (and that of the majority of his audience). Though homosexuality was increasingly accepted, and no longer illegal in France, there was no question of Trenet’s coming out publicly.

He rarely performed “Tu me manques, Johnny” in public, and I can understand why: it’s not very good, and he must have known that. On the one hand, he felt compelled to write about his friend, who died in 1983; on the other, he was too repressed to speak honestly. How, in front of an audience of blue-haired ladies, could he expect simultaneously to expose and to conceal his feelings? Could he take the gamble that alienating a segment of his straight audience might bring him an even larger audience of gay admirers? He chokes, saying only that which anybody might say about anybody else.

The lyric that stuck out for me, as Trenet addressed Johnny, was, “You got married.” It’s the only truly biographical detail in the song. Why did he feel the need to include it? Did it change something? Trenet doesn’t elaborate.

This CD cover takes Johnny’s picture from the double portrait with Charles, seen above, whereas Trenet’s picture is a publicity shot from his movie career — as a solo artist.

Was he protecting himself or his audience — or Hess’ family — from embarrassment? “I’m going to sing a tender song about a boy I knew,” Trenet seems to say, “but it’s okay, don’t worry, because he was straight: he got married, just like you. And as for my own feelings, I’m really not going to say much at all.”

The whole thing, musically as well as textually, is guarded, cramped, generic and bland. The younger, bolder Trenet — “The Singing Madman,” as he was known — would have found some way to insinuate the truth into the song.

Unless, of course, that was the truth: bland and straight. Maybe the boys lived together because they were young and poor, and that arrangement would have been convenient for professional reasons, too — for rehearsals and making sure they weren’t late for a gig. Maybe Johnny married because — you know — he was in love with the woman. And wanted to sleep with her, not with Trenet.

Is it possible that Trenet holds back not because he fears the (gay) truth, but on the contrary, because he fears we’ll read into his words a kind of partnership that didn’t exist with Johnny?

Biographers have puzzled over this relationship for a long time, just as they torture these publicity photos of Cary Grant and his roommate, Randolph Scott; and the extravagantly affectionate correspondence between Abraham Lincoln and his roommate, Joshua Fry Speed. And so on.

It would be flattering in the extreme to draw a connection between myself and these guys: I’d like to point to them as my ancestors. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know definitively what went on between them. Maybe we shouldn’t know; it’s none of our business, really. Yet we keep trying — I keep trying — turning over those rocks and looking for that magic sword, firmly believing that it points the way to my own identity, and my destiny.

Swiss-born, Johnny Hess was a leader of the Zazous, a counter-cultural, nonviolent resistance to the Nazi occupation of France. The Zazous (a term Hess coined) used jazz music and flamboyant dress to signal their opposition to the regime. Some Zazous, though Gentile, went so far as to wear Star of David patches on their clothing. (You can imagine that this didn’t go over well with Vichy or Berlin.) Hess’ solo career never came anywhere near the success that Trenet enjoyed.

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Sfar’s ‘Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)’

Double-take: Elmosnino at work

Singer–songwriter Serge Gainsbourg (1928–91) remains one of the most sacrés of all the monstres in French culture. When a new film based on his life story was announced, I naturally presumed that it was meant primarily to capitalize on the success of the recent biopic of Edith Piaf, La Môme (known in the U.S. as La Vie en Rose) — to say nothing of American hits such as Ray and Walk the Line. Artistically, each of these films has wrestled with cliché, not always winning, and Gainsbourg’s hard-lived life promised many of the same elements. I feared the worst.

What I hadn’t counted on was the participation of Joann Sfar, a comic-book author–illustrator. Directing for the first time, he brings to Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque) an imaginative sensibility unlike any that I’ve seen in any movie about an artist, with the possible exception of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Sfar adapted the screenplay from his own graphic novel,* and while he respects the outlines of biography, he liberates a fantasy, too.

Moi non plus: Lucy Gordon, Eric Elmosnino, and friend.
(On the other side of the desk, the great director Claude Chabrol is having a helluva good time playing a record producer.)

It’s hard to live in France without at least a little awareness of Gainsbourg’s life and music. Born Lucien Ginsburg, he wrote cynical, deliberately provocative songs that, years later, haven’t lost their power to shock. Perhaps the most famous of these is the duet “Je t’aime, moi non plus” (I love you, me neither), a sexual congress in which the woman sings sweetly of love while apparently experiencing several orgasms; her partner is indifferent at best. Gainsbourg recorded this one a couple of times, with two different real-life lovers: Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin.

Musically, he delighted in playing with different styles. Several songs are based on melodies from Classical composers; others play with French music-hall conventions, others twit rock and disco, and his notorious “Reggae Marseillaise” nearly got him killed. He led a very public private life, carrying on affairs with women who were famous or beautiful or both, while embodying a Romantic persona: hard-drinking, rebellious, poetic, self-destructive.

Sfar on the set

That persona is, let’s face it, an enormous cliché, but in making his movie, Sfar eschews all the others of this genre: the clumsy introduction of famous friends and lovers, the ponderous exposition of background, the thudding scenes in which we’re meant to believe that artistic inspiration takes place in a flash and great songs are written easily, the clear-cut rise-and-fall trajectory, the newspaper headline or radio broadcast that announces the Big Historical Event. On the contrary, Sfar doesn’t underline, telegraph, or hammer anything at all.

And so, when Brigitte Bardot makes her entrance, it’s about as theatrical as one can get onscreen: striding in slow-motion down a long hallway, with a dog that looks much like her. The Parisian audience laughed, because they’re sufficiently familiar with Bardot to recognize the actress playing her, and surely they expected Bardot to turn up at some point in any movie about Gainsbourg. Yet never does anybody onscreen say, “Oh, look, it’s Brigitte Bardot,” or “Serge, I want you to meet Brigitte Bardot.” Indeed, nobody says her name at all until several minutes have passed and her scenes are nearly over.

Casta as B.B., with Elmosnino

The many such instances in which Sfar resists the facile are commendable, but that’s only part of his achievement. Consider the sequence when, after a drunken night in Montmartre, Gainsbourg goes home with his mentor, Boris Vian (played by Philippe Katerine). “The Frères Jacques are staying at my place,” Vian says casually.

Cut to Vian’s apartment, and voilà, the Frères Jacques, in full costume, are curled up like Disney elves in any available nook — in a bookcase, over the fireplace — and snoring away. The next morning, they make breakfast, still in costume, singing and sometimes speaking in harmony, and turning the meal into one of their comedy routines.

What’s for breakfast?
Le Quatuor as Les Frères Jacques, with Elmosnino

The catch here is that, if you don’t know who Boris Vian and the Frères Jacques were, Sfar doesn’t offer much help. For that reason, I’m a bit doubtful about the overseas potential of Gainsbourg.

The real-life Gainsbourg was trained as an artist and wanted to pursue a career as a painter. Sfar himself provides the artwork here, and his pictorial sense informs the composition of images. The ordering of scenes and many of the fantastical elements reflect Sfar’s work in graphic fiction, particularly the Petit Vampire series of comic books for children, about the friendship between an orphaned Jewish boy and a family of monsters, and their adventures.

Michel, Fantomate the flying dog, and Petit Vampire

There is something decidedly vampiric about the single most distinctive (and arguably most effective) element of Gainsbourg. “Every poet has a double,” we’re told early in the film, and the young Lucien Ginsburg finds his during the Occupation, shortly after obtaining his yellow Star of David.**

At first, the double is a roly-poly playmate, albeit a monster, his appearance based on an image from an anti-Semitic poster Lucien has seen. As Lucien grows older and becomes Serge, the double becomes a lean, diabolical creature (beautifully mimed by Doug Jones, who was the Faun in Pan’s Labyrinth), with a puppet head, glowing eyes, and a nose and ears even more exaggerated than Gainsbourg’s own.

Gueule d’atmosphère: Jones

Also called La Gueule,*** the double pops up constantly in order to urge Gainsbourg to do what is best for his music — though that’s seldom good for his character. It’s he who spurs Gainsbourg to abandon first his painting, then his children; to sell his songs to Juliette Gréco by seducing her; to betray the trust of naïve France Gall; and so on. He’s like all the Hoffmann villains in one body.

The movie has so much going on that it doesn’t need to fracture the timeline, as Olivier Dahan did in La Môme. Vie héroïque plays out chronologically — and more quickly than La Môme, despite the fact that Gainsbourg lived longer than Piaf did. To maintain this swift pacing, Sfar weighs songs and scenes judiciously. Two early marriages are pretty much glossed over, for example, and I was left unsure how many children Gainsbourg had, yet I didn’t feel I was missing much. (Except possibly some clichés about the tortured private lives of great artists.)

Mouglalis as Gréco, with Elmosnino

Some of the celebrity lookalikes in Gainsbourg are uncanny, not least because they’re played by celebrities: Yolande Moreau (as Fréhel), Anna Mouglalis (as Gréco), and Sara Forestier (as Gall) register strongly, and in a cameo, Sfar himself is spot-on as Georges Brassens. The supermodel Laetitia Casta is taller and leaner than Bardot, and (in previous movies) not much of an actress, yet she’s a revelation here: she locates the real woman behind the sex kitten, and in a dance sequence perfectly mimics Bardot’s trademark physicality.

Young Lucy Gordon, another stunningly beautiful fashion model, delivers a sly, sensitive portrayal of Birkin — no mean feat, since the real Birkin is still around for comparison, constantly on French movie and TV screens. Gordon more than measures up to the reality and to the dramatic requirements of the film, and her performances in Gainsbourg and in Les Poupées russes make one regret all the more that she committed suicide shortly after filming ended, just before her 19th birthday.

Gordon as Birkin

A few lesser-known actors turn in outstanding performances, too. Young Kacey Mottet Klein, as Lucien, is a precocious bundle of audacity, chainsmoking, trying to pick up women, and sassing Vichy bureaucrats. As his father, a frustrated pianist, Razvan Vasilescu warms gradually from stern taskmaster to proud papa, especially excited to meet Bardot. (In some scenes, Vasilescu looks uncannily like Stanley Tucci in Julie and Julia.)

Playing an artist’s model, Ophélia Kolb embodies the promise of pleasure; she plays a similar character, an earthy tavern wench, in L’autre Dumas. I like her work, but I hope she gets to do something different in her next picture.

Gordon and Elmosnino

Eric Elmosnino plays the grownup Gainsbourg, and the physical resemblance between actor and subject is so pronounced that the poor fellow must have trouble finding other work. Yet that resemblance means that he can’t rely on makeup, as Marion Cotillard did for so much of La Môme, and left to his own artistry, he’s superb. Even in the latter portion of the movie, when Gainsbourg is never sober, Elmosnino finds subtle gradations of drunkenness — and also of feeling. And his interaction with the double helps us sympathize with a hero whose actions are not always admirable. As Elmosnino/Gainsbourg’s eyes widen with timidity and doubt, or narrow with resistance to amoral designs, so do ours.

Indeed, I’m not ultimately persuaded that Gainsbourg’s was a heroic life. But I am persuaded that Sfar believes it, and that may be what counts most. His film, unlike most other musical biopics, is a personal vision; certainly I’ll be a long time forgetting this remarkable portrait, a tribute from one artist to another.



*NOTE: Sfar’s graphic novel on Gainsbourg is the size of a family Bible, with gorgeous color illustrations, an even more fantastical narrative, and a prohibitive price tag. I’ve admired it in the bookstore, much the way I admire a painting in a museum.

**Gainsbourg called the Jewish patch “a sheriff’s badge,” and wrote a song about it. “I was born under a lucky star,” he said, “a yellow one.”

***“Gueule” is a slang word for “face,” equivalent to the English “mug.”

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Dalida

“Smile, though your heart is breaking,” Charlie Chaplin wrote, in his most memorable song, the anthem of every sad clown. Dalida was not exactly that, yet she’s remarkable in her ability to convey so much happiness, while suffering so deeply.

These qualities made an icon of the French singer, born in Cairo to Italian parents. Though she’s little-known in the English-speaking world, she was a superstar almost everywhere else, cannily navigating a course from early success in Italianate novelty numbers (in French) to disco, combining glamorous physical beauty (she was Miss Egypt, in 1954) with a nearly over-the-top emotionalism and a husky, belting alto. A generation after her suicide, she remains one of the most revered performers in France.

My Neighbor
The singer’s grave, in the Montmartre Cemetery

Her early hits, for Barclay Records, are simultaneously pure and guilty pleasure: they’re kitsch of the best kind. Capitalizing on her accent, she dove headlong into the wave of Italianate pop culture that swept through so much of postwar Europe and America, from restaurants to record stores to Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida — whose look Dalida mimicked, at first.

Her first big hit, and only her third recording, was “Bambino,” in 1956, an old Neapolitan song in which she addresses a little boy who pines for a hardhearted little girl. “Love and jealousy aren’t child’s play,” she sings, “and you have your whole life to suffer as grownups do.” This is incredibly catchy, and she sings with an audible smile:

“So gratta, gratta [strum] on your mandolino
Mon petit Bambino.
Your music is prettier
Than all the sky of Italy.
And canta, canta in your cuddly voice
Mon petit Bambino.
You can sing as much as you want,
But she doesn’t take you seriously.”

The raw power of her emotionalism went on display early, too, as in “Ciao, Ciao, Bambina,” a breakup song that features an instrumental break, during which she wails (and does not sing) “Bambina!” at the top of her lungs. Try it some time, and you’ll feel better.

As Europe became ever-more united, Dalida was ahead of the curve, adding to her Franco-Italian repertory songs from Germany, Spain, and Greece (the French version of “Never on Sunday,” for example). “Hava Nagila” was an early hit, and she covered American songs, too: Pat Boone’s “Speedy Gonzales,” Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, The Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Sonny and Cher’s “Bang Bang,” and, memorably, “Itsi Bitsi Petit Bikini.” (She leaves out the yellow polka dots, but it’s “tout petit-petit.”)

Success in America eluded her, and she may have been thinking of her own experience when she sang “Gigi l’Amoroso,” about a small-town Italian boy who goes to Hollywood to become “the best-looking Caruso of all” — and comes home disappointed. Consoling him, she scoffs, “The Americans! What do they understand but le rock and le twist?”

Seeking more serious material in the late ’60s and early ’70s, she tried her hand at the melancholy, ruminative, intellectual sort of French song, but the style was at odds with her inherent brio. French philosophy sounds better when growled, not à pleine voix, and she was never a diseuse.

In 1974, for example, she recorded “Il vient d’avoir 18 ans” (He just turned 18), which owes more to Brel than to Bambino. This time, the boy has grown up — a little — and by now, he “laughs at words of love.” Unnervingly, she finds him attractive and sleeps with him anyway. Serge Lama’s “Je suis malade” becomes explosive, operatic, in Dalida’s hands — though it works, somehow. Perhaps because we sensed that she was telling the truth.

In 1976, she turned next to disco, with immense success, beginning with a thumpa-thumpa cover of the Rina Ketty standard from the 1930s, “J’attendrai”; more hits followed, and Dalida traded in her sequined evening gown for rhinestone jumpsuits, while her backup dancers (never butch) donned motorcycle caps and leather gear instead of tuxedoes. Her gay following — already devout — became a permanent fixture at this time.

And along the way, she became a pioneer of ethnic fusion, with “Salma Ya Salama,” an irresistible Egyptian song she performed in Arabic, French, Spanish, and English. No boundaries existed for her: she sang “Besame Mucho” in Japan.

But as the years went by, she was increasingly unhappy. One of her later hits was “Mourir sur Scène” (To die onstage), and while Shirley Bassey lately refashioned it as “I Was Born to Sing,” that’s not the same thing at all. Really, Dalida makes the song a variation on Hamlet: “To be performing, or not to be.” She’s warning us of what’s about to come.

Though Dalida was clearly depressive, she also had rotten luck. She seems to have been a magnet for suicidal men, and no fewer than three of her lovers killed themselves. A surgical procedure in the 1960s left her unable to have children, and in time even the adulation of the public was no longer enough to soothe her troubled soul.

In 1987, she took an overdose of barbiturates, leaving a note that read, “Life is unbearable to me.”

I prefer to remember her as she was in the beginning, when happiness still seemed possible for her, in the abundance that she offered every day to others. Dalida, come prima: “Tu me donnes tant de joie, que personne ne me donne comme toi."

As in the beginning,
You give me so much joy,
Which nobody gives me
The way you do.

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Filip

Bogosse nec plus ultra,
le dauphin de tous les minets

If brevity is indeed the soul of wit, then the life and career of Filip Nikolic constitute a work of genius. The former standout of 2Be3, France’s most successful boy band, was barely 35 years old when he died 16 September of a heart attack, definitively answering the question, “Where Are They Now?”

It turns out he’d been acting on a TV police drama, in plain view for several years, and preparing a solo comeback in music. Yet he’d nevertheless slipped into such obscurity that the newspaper Libération purposely misspelled his name as “Philippe” throughout his obituary. The point, I guess, was to signify the dim recollection most readers would have of a man who was once — for about 15 minutes — one of the country’s biggest pop stars. Très amusant, non? (And I’ll bet his family loved reading it.)

How fleeting is fame! And beauty! And life.



You may not have been aware of the international arms race in boy bands, but it’s a matter of historical record: in the 1990s, 2Be3 was France’s leading answer to the dominant American and British groups.* French producers sought to surge ahead of the competition by casting adults (all three “boys” were in their 20s), instead of assembling young teens and building them up over time, according to the standard practice. In a sense, this put a time limit on the experiment: if 2Be3 didn’t catch on fast, the boys band would be old men.

Yet success was almost instantaneous. Within a year of the band’s launching, in 1996, their likenesses were enshrined in the Grevin wax museum, a certain indicator of French celebrity. 2Be3’s first and second albums sold so well that the boys took a long hiatus in the United States, to perfect their English and to cultivate their ultimate ambition: to work with Madonna. However, few people, least of all Madge, noticed the results (“Excuse My French”), and the group broke up. French women and gay men may now remember 2Be3 only mistily and with slight embarrassment, as early crushes, the stuff of adolescent dreams, before taste and experience were acquired.

Filip and his bandmates, Adel Kachermi and Frank Delay, had known each other since junior-high school (unlike most boy bands, who meet first in a producer’s casting call). Apart from that friendship, however, they could hardly have seemed more artificial: ethnically mixed as if to the specifications of a marketing survey**, chiseled and buffed to improbable radiance.

There was absolutely nothing homoerotic about 2Be3.
I have no idea why you would think a thing like that.

It was difficult to discern their actual talents. Their voices were so synthesized and homogenized that they could have come from anywhere. If 2Be3 never endured nasty rumors or a Milli Vanilli scandal, that may be due only to the fact that the group disbanded in 2001, just as the French really latched onto the Internet.

They surely were no actors, as they demonstrated on their weekly sitcom, which made Saved by the Bell look like the Comédie Française, and which consisted primarily of excuses for the boys to parade shirtless or in their underwear while complaining about their girlfriends. The continual, contrived exposure of exquisite flesh led to a substantial gay following. When amateur photos of Filip naked in a backstage shower popped up in a magazine, and teenyboppers’ parents expressed shock and disappointment***, his gay fans only wondered what had taken so damned long. We’d been waiting.


As dancers, 2Be3 did display some genuine skill, and Filip’s training as a gymnast graced the act with impressive backflips and handstands. Yet this proficiency in choreography only led to further doubts about vocal ability. Since there was no way they could dance that way while singing, it stood to reason that they performed to pre-recorded tracks — and who could be sure who’d done the pre-recording? After all, singing acts with more distinctive voices usually hire other people to do the acrobatic dancing.

These things might have mattered more if the stakes had been higher. But the songs were dancy piffle, sugar-free bubblegum that won’t stick to your braces. (That said, their biggest hit, “Partir un jour,” has thumped through my head for days.) Nobody took 2Be3 very seriously, and when their flash-in-the-pan popularity began to fade, they discreetly (for the most part) stepped out of the spotlight and went to look for other work.

Filip himself always struck me as an amiable, unpretentious fellow, perhaps not the sharpest cheese in the larder but conscientious in his attempts to make the most of his limited assets. That his life has proved as brief as his success is sad indeed. And as this phase of my life in France draws to a close, his death reminds me that nothing lasts.


*NOTE: The name 2Be3 is weak wordplay, presumably signaling a desire for success in Britain and America: with a French accent, “to be three” sounds like “to be free.” “Pour être libre” became the group’s rallying cry and title of their sitcom, but non-fans derided them as “deux-beuh-trois.”

**NOTE: While all the boys were born in France, Filip’s family is of Serbian ancestry.

***NOTE: Apparently, other French pop stars shower fully clothed. Now you know.

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Charles Trenet

“The French, they are a funny race,” we’re told, but chances are, as an American studying French and (horreur!) living among French people, you don’t have much proof.

It’s not that the French are devoid of humor. Far from it. Most French people you ever meet, including your in-laws, are eager to laugh at you — or any other Americans. Your cultural imperialism, so inferior to their cultural imperialism. Your table manners. Your quaint notions about hygiene, politics, and whether to eat offal. Above all, your attempts to speak their language. These are the foundations of comedy in France today.

But when it comes to making others laugh, the French simply can’t be bothered. Their stand-up comics are chainsmoking misanthropes who speak a slang so dense, I’m sure other French people don’t understand it, and only laugh for fear that someone will mistake them for Americans. En bref, whether they are sneering at you or seducing you, the French are deadly serious.

Charles Trenet was the exception. When the chansonneur died a few years ago, everybody talked about the poetic romance of such hits as “Beyond the Sea” (“La Mer’) and “I Wish You Love” (even more poetic — and melancholy — in the original, “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?”). Oui, oui, oui, he was the first poet of the music-hall, writing his own material long before Brel and Gainsbourg. But the essential Trenet has been overlooked.

They called him “Le Fou Chantant,” the singing madman. He combined elements of Allan Jones (looks), Danny Kaye (style) and Irving Berlin (music). Pushing a porkpie hat back on his strawberry-blond head, he hopped around the stage, rolling his eyes, shimmying his shoulders, emitting noises no Frenchman ever made in public before. In “Boum!”, by far his greatest song, he explains that, while clocks go “tick-tock” and turkeys go “gloo-gloo-gloo,” our hearts go “boom” when we’re in love. “Even God says ‘boom’ in His armchair of clouds,” Trenet informs us. But he’s so overwhelmed by his “boom” that, by the end of the song, he’s just babbling: “Boom-boom-boom-b-b-b-b-b-b-bbb!” In “Il pleut dans ma chambre” (It’s raining in my bedroom), he goes completely unhinged as he imitates raindrops, wet cats, and a deluge of post-Louis XV proportions.

Even if your French isn’t good enough to get the full effect of his wordplay, you can have fun with these lyrics. It took a singing madman to understand what generations of first-year French students always knew: simple phrases in French sound hilarious.

“Tout est au duc” (Everything belongs to the duke) and “Débit de l’eau, débit du lait” (Public house for water, milk) become rhythmic and comic launch pads. “Fleur bleue” (Blue flower) becomes a love-madness which makes “words difficult to pronounce.” Young lovers’ clothes fly off faster than pigeons. The moon and the sun have a date, but can’t get together. A young poet, in love with the frosty Englishwoman “Miss Emily,” weeps “des larmes comme du beurre” (tears like butter — melted, presumably). And who can forget the immortal words of Trenet’s hatcheck girl: “Monsieur, monsieur, vous oubliez votre cheval”(Sir, you’re forgetting your horse)?

Surrealism, absurdism: these are just college-level substitutes for Trenet songs, and much less fun.

Even in his mellower moods, he is the rare French singer whose music never drove anyone to suicide. On the contrary, I suspect he’s saved lives. Trenet was fundamentally optimistic, and found in American swing the perfect vehicle for his sunny philosophies. His instinctive understanding of jazz, his impeccable use of Big Band orchestrations, didn’t contaminate his art or condemn his music to the cultural Chernobyl of Disney-McDonald’s globalization. Rather, they elevated novelty numbers and pop songs to enduring classics. He outlasted everybody from Chevalier to 2Be3.

Thanks to Trenet, the French were indeed a funny race. They’d have preferred to keep this secret. But I love the French better, knowing Trenet was one of them.

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