I’ve been re-watching Francois Ozon’s magnificently silly comedy 8 Femmes – a wonderful means of relaxing, that can be enjoyed just as a bit of fun but offers so much more if you’re in the mood. If Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven offers one sort of hommage to the films of Douglas Sirk, revealing the real darkness and painful secrets within such stories, Ozon revels in the melodrama and visual sumptuousness. One of its glories, and of course the major selling-point, is the simple fact that it packs eight great French actresses into a snowed-in house with a murder mystery and eggs them on into acting off against one another in contrasting styles. I can’t help wishing for a Hearts of Darkness documentary in which we discover the real dynamic behind Catherine Deveuve hitting Danielle Darrieux with a bottle or wrestling on the floor with Fanny Ardant, or the multi-layered stares exchanged between Emanuelle Beart and Virginie Ledoyen. Or, even better, a Noises Off melodramatic comedy within the melodramatic comedy, not least given the fact that Ledoyen was pregnant during the filming as well as in the film…
The even greater thing about the film is the fact that each of the cast gets a musical number – and one way of understanding its particular style is to imagine that each of the cast is taking it in turns to be the human guest in an episode of The Muppets, playing it more or less straight in front of a chorus of singing animals. The songs are drawn from French pop music from the 1960s to the 1980s, which includes some wonderfully sad laments and lively pop numbers – all of which do, in different ways, offer a further commentary on the social roles and cultural expectations of women, by bringing the sentiments of earlier decades into the early twenty-first century. The great thing about re-watching today, of course, is the relative ease of tracking down the originals (most of which are on Spotify, and all on YouTube), and indeed the only reason I’m writing this post is to make available a compilation of those originals for anyone who’s interested…
https://www.podbean.com/media/player/kw55i-92b05b?from=yiiadmin
What I don’t know is how far these songs are intended to be very familiar to the main audience for the film, just in a different setting being sung by a famous actress – the equivalent of Moulin Rouge or that stupid Abba film – and how far this is about recovering and reinventing obscurities (or at least partly; even I’ve heard of Francoise Hardy, so the pleasure is hearing her ennui-soaked slices of misery reinterpreted by Isabelle Huppert and Danielle Darrieux). I didn’t get on with Moulin Rouge precisely because the songs were far too familiar (not to mention the brutal murder of one of the greatest pop-soul numbers ever), so encountering them in a different context felt very odd, whereas the songs in 8 Femmes feel much more appropriate in their new setting – and the questionable singing voices of some of the cast felt like less of an issue and more of a characterisation.
Take Dalida’s rendition of De ne pas vivre seul: powerful, well-trained voice, within a dramatic orchestral arrangement, cranking up the dramatic emotion. Firmine Richard hasn’t got half the range, and talks rather than sings half the time – but makes it a different song, defeated but defiant. Deneuve’s account of Toi jamais is fully in the spirit of the original, but delivered with more world-weary power and despair (and a much less annoying backing track), while Fanny Ardant turns a condemnation of flighty women who lead empty lives without love into a celebration of the bohemian life. Maybe French viewers sit there fuming about how Beart can’t sing as well as Corynne Charbry and Huppert has murdered their beloved Message personnel…
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