Deixa-me rir...

Caros Audiophiles, these past two weeks I have attended several films from all around the world during the London Film Festival. One of the most enjoyable is a French film titled L'Art d'Aimer, or The Art Of Love. It is a kind of French Woody Allen movie, a typically French witty analysis of the lessons that have to be learned in the complexities of love and attraction. These are told through the stories, sometimes intertwined, of various protagonists: two single neighbours who are attracted but never quite find the 'perfect' moment; a married woman who offers her husband to her best female friend who is single; a man is introduced to a woman he is not attracted to but then, by accident, he encounters the same woman in a dark hotel room and thinks he has found the love of his life; a young couple deeply in love but through a misunderstanding begin, wrongly, to question each other's fidelity; an older couple who must find a solution when the wife suddenly starts fancying every man she encounters; and so on...

The prologue of the film is a short story of a classical pianist whose music is the soundtrack for other people when they fall in love; and yet his own heart has never yet heard the music of falling in love.

Which sort of brings me to a French group called Nouvelle Vague. They are comprised essentially of a nucleus of two male musicians who engage a changing collective of female singers.

Their name reflects their love of 'nouvelle vague' French cinema of the 1950s and 60s, of Brazilian 'bossa nova' rhythms of the 1960s, and of British and American 'new wave' punk and post-punk music of the 1970s and 80s.

They do not compose their own songs, but instead re-imagine classic or sometimes quite obscure 'new wave' songs in a bossa nova style. Each female singer is chosen because she has never heard the original song so that each new version can realise a unique fresh quality and interpretation.

Here are two of their best examples:

In A Manner Of Speaking, originally by post-punk band Tuxedo Moon:

In a Manner of speaking
I just want to say
That I could never forget the way
You told me everything
By saying nothing

In a manner of speaking
I don't understand
How love in silence becomes reprimand
But the way that i feel about you
Is beyond words

Oh give me the words
Give me the words
That tell me nothing
Ohohohoh give me the words
Give me the words
That tell me everything

In a manner of speaking
Semantics won't do
In this life that we live we only make do
And the way that we feel
Might have to be sacrificed

So in a manner of speaking
I just want to say
That just like you I should find a way
To tell you everything
By saying nothing.

Dance With Me, originally by Lords Of The New Church. The video is taken from Jean-Luc Godard's 'nouvelle vague' film Bande A Part, a scene which matches the rhythm of the song perfectly:

A proxima.

PO