They Eat Horses, Don't They? Read online

  Johnny’s groundbreaking exploits gave rise to a whole new slew of French pop singers in the 1960s, collectively known as the ‘yé yé generation’. Some acts were purely imitative, but many were the real deal. And the biggest deal of all was Serge Gainsbourg. A chain-smoker and alcoholic who introduced designer stubble as a style statement, Gainsbourg made high art of bad taste, with songs as diverse in their subject matter as farting, oral sex, incest, cabbages, urination, and Nazi death camps.†

  † Making an art of bad taste is not, in fact, a new concept in French cultural output. As early as 1857, Charles Baudelaire shocked the public with a poem in his collection Les Fleurs du Mal called ‘Une Charogne’ (‘A Carcass’), in which he daringly compared a woman he was courting to the rotting corpse of a dead animal.

  Undoubtedly his most (in)famous song, the duet ‘Je t’aime... moi non plus’ (performed with his lover, the English actress Jane Birkin, in 1969) refers to him as a wave entering and receding from the loins of his lover.*

  * ‘Je t’aime... moi non plus’ was originally recorded in 1967 by Serge Gainsbourg with Brigitte Bardot, but after one scandalous broadcast on the radio station Europe I, Bardot’s then husband, the German businessman Gunter Sachs, threatened legal action. The couple split up shortly after the broadcast. At Bardot’s request, the Bardot/Gainsbourg recording of the song was not played on the radio again and has never been officially released.

  The soundtrack included such orgasmic pants and groans that it was long believed it had been recorded by placing a tape recorder under the couple’s bed. On its release, the song was instantly banned in most countries and was denounced by the Vatican (which also excommunicated the record executive who had released it in Italy). Gainsbourg reacted by stating that the Pope was ‘our best PR man’.

  Gainsbourg continued to shock and titillate the French bourgeoisie throughout the 1970s and 1980s, notably by recording in 1979 a reggae version of the French national anthem, La Marseillaise; by burning a 500-franc note on live television in 1984; and by recording a song called ‘Lemon Incest’ with his then twelve-year-old daughter Charlotte, featuring a cover with them sprawled semi-naked on a bed. On his death at the relatively early age of 62 (his obituary in the newspaper Libération claimed he had died because ‘il a bu trop de cigarettes’ – ‘he drank too many cigarettes’),9 he received something close to a state funeral, while President Mitterrand eulogized him as ‘our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire’. Gainsbourg had managed to take elements from the ‘new’ music coming from abroad and combine it with the French chanson to create something that was quintessentially French: as heady and lethal as a pack of Gauloises.

  Everything ends with a song.

  PIERRE-AUGUSTIN CARON DE BEAUMARCHAIS, FRENCH PLAYWRIGHT AND REVOLUTIONARY (1732–99)

  As for the present, recent French polls indicate that the chanson is still a big hitter, drawing 51 per cent of the total music-listening French public (although the share of chanson is gradually giving way to mainstream rock and pop music, including international pop).10 The classic chansons, with their focus on universal and everyday issues, do not really date. Unlike Anglo-American pop songs, which tend to deal in angst-ridden teenage problems, the subject matter of the French chanson reflects life in all its stages. For example, it is hard to imagine the average English chart topper dealing with such uncool subjects as a child-custody battle, the love of an elderly married couple, attachment to one’s home town, or the destruction of a small terraced Paris garden to make room for a parking lot.*

  * The songs referred to are, respectively: ‘Mon Fils, ma Bataille’ (Daniel Balavoine); ‘Les Vieux Mariés’ (Michel Sardou); ‘Toulouse’ (Claude Nougaro); and ‘Le Petit Jardin’ (Jacques Dutronc).

  But this is one of the charms of the French chanson. It doesn’t have to be about chains and whips, not wanting to go into rehab, or everything being cool because you’re getting thinner or smacking up your bitch. (This said, some chansons are best left shrouded in obscurity. Do, for example, try to avoid Eddy Mitchell – he of the bouffant hair and skimpy leather jackets – and Gilbert Bécaud. Generally, any French singer with an English name – Johnny Hallyday, Eddy Mitchell, Dick Rivers – should be approached with extreme caution.) Whereas the Anglo-American tradition tends to identify a song very strongly with its originator, the French take the view that a good song floats free of the original singer and becomes part of the national canon, open to reinterpretation across the generations. For instance, a classic like ‘Ne me quitte pas’ (literally ‘Don’t leave me’, but popularized in English as the ballad ‘If You Go Away’), originally composed and sung by Jacques Brel in 1959, has subsequently been reinterpreted over fifty times, by such diverse artistes as Edith Piaf, Barbara, Johnny Hallyday, Jane Birkin, Juliette Gréco, Nana Mouskouri, Nina Simone and Sting. In France, cover versions, far from being naff, are seen as a way of keeping good songs alive, fresh and relevant. This applies not only to French songs, but foreign songs too: I for one rediscovered English songs like Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ and 4 Non Blondes’ ‘What’s Up’ through French cover versions. Classic songs in France thus tend to reinforce the link between generations – the children of each decade have their quintessential expression of ‘Ne me quitte pas’. In Britain, by contrast, each generation tends to identify very strongly with a particular era of pop music, so reinforcing generational divides.

  DOING IT CLOCLO’S WAY (skip)

  It is a little-known fact that the classic ballad ‘My Way,’ made world-famous by the Italian-American crooner Frank Sinatra, was originally a French song. It was first made a hit in 1967 by the French pop star Claude François (1939–78), under the title ‘Comme d’habitude’ (‘As Usual’), the lyrics telling the story of a couple going through the motions of life together as their relationship breaks down. It is thought that the original lyrics referred to the breakdown of Claude François’ then relationship with the petite blonde star of the ‘yé-yé generation’, France Gall. The American lyricist Paul Anka heard Claude François singing ‘Comme d’habitude’ during a holiday in the south of France and reset the melody to English lyrics as ‘My Way’, completely changing the theme to one of a man looking back on his life. In the hands of Ol’ Blue Eyes it became a global smash hit, the most-recognized pop song in the world today and frequently chosen by people to be played at their, or their relatives’, funerals.

  Affectionately known to his adoring French public by the nickname ‘Cloclo’, Claude François died at the untimely age of 39 when he was accidentally electrocuted in the shower in his Paris apartment. With his blonde flick and glitter suits, he was for many years derided by the French intelligentsia as a naff homegrown version of Liberace, a purveyor of songs heavy in schmaltz and light in content. But more recently he has been re-evaluated by a generation nostalgic for the upbeat melodies of a happier age. His annoyingly catchy song ‘Alexandrie Alexandra’ is still a French disco standard, and ‘Comme d’habitude’ remains one of the best-selling French pop songs of all time.

  Outside of and overlapping with the chanson, the French pop music scene today is hugely rich and complex. French rap and hip hop make up the second-largest market in the world, with Parisian rap groups such as Sexion d’Assaut regularly topping the charts. French electronic dance music is also an international chart leader, with bands such as Air and Daft Punk hitting the decks of DJs around the world (dance music has the undoubted advantage of few if any words, and so is more easily exportable than the traditional chanson). Multilingual singer Manu Chao mixes languages with Spanish-French tracks like ‘Me Gustas Tu’. Even the infamous frog rock so despised by John Lennon has undergone winds of change with the advent of French rock bands such as the Bordeaux group Noir Désir (‘Black Desire’).*

  * Noir Désir have frequently been compared to their gurus The Doors, and certainly the lead singer Bertrand Cantat seems to have followed in Jim Morrison’s footsteps in terms of the melodramas of his life: he was imprisoned for the k
illing of his girlfriend Marie Trintignant (daughter of veteran actor Jean-Louis Trintignant) in 2003, and his wife subsequently committed suicide in 2010. The band dissolved shortly after the Trintignant killing, but they had already towered over the French rock scene for twenty years with their poetically tortured songs. Listen, for example, to the haunting ballad ‘Le Vent nous portera’. Morrison himself, of course, was famously interred in Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris after dying of a heroin overdose in the French capital in 1971. His graffiti-covered sepulchre has become a place of pilgrimage for angst-ridden teenagers of all nationalities.

  In fact, it all seems a long way from the satin hotpants of the Eurovision Song Contest. And now, perhaps, it is the smug world of English-language popular music that needs to watch out. The French are striking back, with revenge attacks on the excesses of bad taste of a different kind peddled by Anglo-American pop music. Early in 2012, for example, French comedian/singer Max Boublil released ‘Put your sex in the air’, a song that takes a sharply satirical swipe at the Rihannas and Lady Gagas of this world, who pepper their song lyrics with words and phrases that are, some might say, not wholly appropriate to their early teenage audience. Boublil’s song runs: ‘Dans mes chansons j’aime faire des danses obscènes / Pour que mes petits fans de douze ans refassent le même’ (‘In my songs I like to do obscene dances, so that my twelve-year-old fans can do the same…’). In all probability, the title of Boublil’s song alludes to Rihanna’s ‘S&M’, which contains the lines ‘Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it…’

  So next time you hear a French pop song and snigger, think again. They might just be sniggering at you, too.

  Myth Evaluation: False.

  FRENCH FILMS ARE UNIFORMLY PRETENTIOUS

  French films follow a basic formula: Husband sleeps with Jeanne because Bernadette cuckolded him sleeping with Christophe, and in the end they all go off to a restaurant.

  SOPHIE MARCEAU, FRENCH ACTRESS (OBSERVER INTERVIEW, 26 MARCH 1995)

  Georges Franju: Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Jean-Luc Godard: Certainly, but not necessarily in that order.

  INTERVIEW IN TIME MAGAZINE, 14 SEPTEMBER 1981

  The air is filled with the sound of seagulls screaming. Jerkily, the camera pans past some sections of concrete pipe towards an enormous rubbish tip that towers on the horizon. At the edge of the rubbish tip, a woman with blonde, flowing locks sits on a chair, gazing moodily into space. She holds a large cabbage on her lap. A man in a loosely-tied cravat and dark glasses, with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, sidles up to her. There is a long silence, punctuated only by the incessant cries of the gulls. ‘Bonjour,’ he says, finally. ‘Bonjour,’ she replies, after a pause. ‘I see that you have a cabbage.’ ‘Yes,’ she replies. They remain staring for a while in moody silence…

  The opening sequence of a late Godard movie? One might be forgiven for thinking so. In fact, this is the opening scene of a Monty Python sketch (‘French Subtitled Film’) from the legendary BBC comedy series of the 1970s.11 Parody though it is, the skit is easily matched – and even surpassed – by many French films of the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave era* for moody silences, clunking symbolism, stilted dialogue and pregnant pauses.

  * That is, European and especially French art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.

  And yet – aside from the excesses of the late New Wave, which have been largely to blame for its not totally unjust reputation for extended exercises in navel-gazing – French cinema has a great deal of which to be extremely proud. It was, after all, two French brothers – Auguste and Louis Lumière – who invented the concept of cinema in the first place, giving the world’s first commercial public movie screening with ten grainy, hand-cranked projector shorts at the Salon Indien du Grand Café de Paris in 1895. Unfortunately, setting what was to become a general precedent for French movie-making – that is, giving birth to avant-garde ideas and then leaving others to make a fortune out of popularizing them – the Lumière brothers were loftily convinced that the cinema was ‘an invention without any future’, deserting film for new photographic projects. Other French film-makers took up the baton to help shape what was to become the dominant new creative medium of the twentieth century: early special effects in the multiple exposures and dissolves of the first ‘Cinemagician’ Georges Méliès; pioneering work in the first sound movies by giants of French cinema such as Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir. Son of the illustrious Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste, Renoir carried the subtle social commentary of his father from canvas to the silver screen for a new age.

  TO ANGLO-AMERICANS, THE FLICKS: TO THE FRENCH, THE SEVENTH ART (skip)

  The curious term ‘the seventh art’ is frequently used by the French to describe the cinema, and reveals the deep veneration with which film-making has traditionally been viewed in France, as an art of the highest order. The term derives from the definition by the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in his Lectures on Aesthetics of the first six arts. The Italian film critic Ricciotta Canudo then invented the term ‘seventh art’ in a manifesto published in 1911 to describe cinema, which he contended was a synthesis of the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture and painting) with the temporal arts (music and dance). The other six arts are:

  ‘Cinema is an industry but it is also – unfortunately – an art,’ the French dramatist Jean Anouilh once observed. One of the strengths (and perhaps weaknesses) of French cinema lies in precisely this statement. For to the French, serious cinema has traditionally been primarily an art form, over and above mass entertainment – le septième art, or ‘seventh art’, as it is routinely referred to in the French media (see here).Thus, while ordinary French people have traditionally lived on a diet of comedies, the grand set-pieces of ‘serious’ French art cinema have in the past been the preserve of the chattering classes: the French bourgeoisie and international film critics. The lofty aspirations of French cinema reached their apogee in the hugely influential film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, which from the 1950s onwards defined the quintessentially French concept of the film director as auteur. That is, that film is essentially a vehicle for the creative vision and voice of the director or author, a ‘voice’ that somehow manages to penetrate through the myriad other voices and elements of the production process. It was faith in the messianic message of the auteur that produced the quirky, fabulous, idiosyncratic and sometimes downright freakish films of the French Nouvelle Vague.*

  * French film-makers were making avant-garde and quirky movies even before the Nouvelle Vague. As in, for example, the weird Surrealist movie Un Chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali (1929), or Jean Vigo’s daring Zéro de conduite / Zero for Conduct (1933), an unsettling portrayal of schoolchildren rebelling against institutional violence that inspired Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film If.

  The films of the 1950s and early 1960s Nouvelle Vague included some of the greatest ever made – Godard’s À Bout de souffle (‘Breathless’) or Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, for example – but in later years the movement became a parody of itself, producing exercises in French existential emptiness that were beyond the ken of virtually everyone. Take, for example, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 movie Weekend.12 A bourgeois couple with secret lovers (incidentally planning to kill each other), take what seems to be an interminable ramble across the French countryside. The film includes a single tracking shot of over eight minutes, following a car crawling through a traffic jam. Subtitles appear at various intervals, providing the viewer with such pearls of wisdom as that he or she is watching a film ‘adrift in the cosmos’, or a movie which was ‘found on a scrapheap’ (possibly revealing the inspiration for the Monty Python sketch). The film ends with a scene set in a camp populated by hippie cannibals, during which the viewer is treated to cameo appearances by Emily Brontë and Sir Walter Scott, and a long lecture on the virtues of communism (not forgetting the on-screen killing of a chicken along the way). A film about boredom and pretentiousness,
apparently. Or maybe, just a pretentious and boring film?* ‘The cinema is truth 24 times per second,’ the character Bruno Forestier says in Godard’s 1963 movie, Le Petit Soldat (‘The Little Soldier’). In Weekend, we have to endure every one of the 151,200 nanoseconds of ‘truth’ that make up the film.

  * Another New Wave director in whose splendidly aesthetic films very little happens is Eric Rohmer. A character in the 1975 US film Night Moves describes watching Rohmer’s films as ‘kind of like watching paint dry’.

  Cosseted by a system of subsidies and by the protection conferred by the French ‘cultural exception’ – and possibly also wishing to put clear blue water between their high-minded oeuvre cinématographique and the popular American blockbuster – French art-house cinema makers in the 1990s took to producing extensive, tedious exercises in navel contemplation.*

  * The French ‘cultural exception’ is a phrase the French are very fond of using, in a wide sense, almost in any context, to signify their cultural difference from – for which read superiority to – everybody else. In the narrow sense, the French ‘cultural exception’ was an exception negotiated by the French government to the GATT provisions regulating international trade in the 1990s, with respect to ‘cultural’ products such as cinema, enabling the French to maintain subsidies for the native French cinema industry and limiting foreign (especially American) film imports.

  Take the Three Colours trilogy of films by the Polish-French film director Krzysztof Kieślowski, for example. In Three Colours Blue (1993)13 – possibly the most animated of the three movies – there is hardly any dialogue whatsoever, but instead a lot of pregnant pauses during which Juliette Binoche stares at a cup of coffee in a café or lasciviously licks a blue lolly. It is a combination of soft porn and pseudo-intellectualism that characterizes much of this period of French art-house cinema, possibly designed to appeal to the louche Serge Gainsbourg types who once hung out in cafés on the Left Bank. There is, in fact, a brief period in early adulthood when these kinds of film do appeal, especially to male university students, largely because they combine soft porn with a cred-salvaging leavening of intellectual angst.