I'd Love to Turn You On #243 - Serge Gainsbourg - Histoire De Melody Nelson (1971)

  Melody Nelson lived fourteen autumns and fifteen summers when she was struck by the front end of a Silver Ghost. The driver, who we can only assume is some extension of the artist in question, was met with confusion and inexplicable lust. Melody survives the incident, but not without being subjected to the narrator’s bizarre, Nabokavian tendencies. Gainsbourg, with the help of partner Jean-Claude Vannier and guest musicians Alan Parker and Dave Richmond among others, spends just under 28 minutes unfolding a musical narrative to which there are many dark, euphoric, and ambiguous sides.

 Histoire De Melody Nelson is a landmark record looked upon by countless musicians as a sonic reference point, and by critics as a benchmark in the field of concept albums. It is perhaps the most influential French rock album ever released and has been covered, and to some extent copied countless times in the 48 years since its release. Beck, who notably paid homage to the album’s title track on his 2003 breakup bummer, Sea Change, called the album “one of the greatest marriages of rock band and orchestra” he’d ever heard. Upon listening, it’s not difficult to understand why. The record opens with a plodding, quiet bassline over jagged guitar riffs that are soon met with the sinister vocal delivery of Serge Gainsbourg relaying in spoken word the story of hitting Melody on her bicycle as he (or the narrator) haplessly drives his Rolls Royce. The darkness of it all becomes quickly euphoric as a swelling orchestra builds over the track’s otherwise brooding atmosphere. Highlighted by production that’s as rich as it is spacious, each musician is given their chance to shine here, but no one instrument distracts from or overshadows its counterparts. The tracks that follow act as vignettes, conveying the narrator’s increasing affinity for the album’s title character.

While the bookend tracks take most of the glory, the sheer musicianship flourishes throughout, without the end product feeling like homework or something that takes itself too seriously. The album’s studio playfulness leads to wonderful, slightly less musical moments. On the track “En Melody,” bursts of maniacal laughter break out over a ferocious drum beat as Gainsbourg relates the story of a plane crash that ultimately takes the life of young Melody. Violinist Jean-Luc Ponty adds a set of strings to the mix as tensions rise toward the fatal crash. The laughter coming from the voice of the titular character, played here by Gainsbourg’s then-wife Jane Birkin, was achieved by Birkin being tickled in the recording booth during the session. Her cackles add a layer of palpable anxiousness as Melody’s short story comes to a bloody, abrupt end.

Below the surface, Melody Nelson is a tremendously complicated exploration of masculinity and its dark, inherent sexuality viewed through the lens of tragedy - though Gainsbourg doesn’t really to seem to offer answers to this complexity here. Melody Nelson, like the strange relationship that unfolds through the album’s story, is another question mark in the life of the story’s recounter. Gainsbourg makes a point to state from the beginning that the story’s central characters are involved in this accident through naivety; in terms of childlike innocence via the story’s victim and by contrast, age and recklessness via its narrator. In the middle somewhere lie love and lust: two timeless themes that have been endlessly tackled by musician after musician. Perhaps Gainsbourg understood this to be heavily trod thematic ground and saw an opportunity to disclose a side of these feelings not often explored, and its provocativeness is nothing more than that. Or maybe the story is somewhat autobiographical and we’re getting a real look into the sinister, paranoid world of the musician in question. Ultimately that truth wouldn’t serve or enhance anyone’s understanding of the album, and its moral ambiguity factors heavily into the atmosphere of it all. The underlying story plays more of a supporting role to Gainsbourg and his band than it does actually try to say something about its subjects and their interactions.

The record’s cinematic nature was, at the time of release, unparalleled by anything else in its genre. While Melody Nelson isn’t exactly a rock opera in comparison to something like The Who’s Tommy, it does a brilliant job of creating a mood to match its subject and creates fertile ground for linear storytelling.

- Blake Britton (Initials B.B.)

I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #204 - Diva (1981, dir. Jean-Jacques Beineix)

 About two thirds of the way through Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film Diva, our hero, Jules, is being chased through a Paris Metro station on his moped by a police officer. He’s wearing all red, tabla music is fading in and out, and the shifting camera angles constantly break the 180-degree rule. It’s a disorienting, beautiful sequence, one that seems so preoccupied with creating a feeling of psychedelia out of context that it prompts the viewer to forget that it makes sense narratively. Depending on your point of view, that’s a critique that could be levied at the rest of the film, too; but the magic of Diva is that it does work in spite of all its massively disparate impulses, plot threads, and philosophical interests.

            At its core, Diva is obsessed with Walter Benjamin’s conception of the “aura”; an individual piece of art, Benjamin says, has a particular aura that one can only truly understand when viewing the original. This posed a problem when art – namely, music and film – was being reproduced on a mass scale. Auras can’t necessarily be replicated, Benjamin says. Cynthia Hawkins, the American opera singer unknowingly involved in Diva’s crime narrative, is aware of that. She stalwartly refuses to record her performances, saying that the beauty of an opera performance is in the collaboration between singer, symphony, and audience on any given night. When Cynthia’s performance in Paris is expertly bootlegged by Jules, a series of events is set in motion that soon embroils her, Jules, the chief of police, some Taiwanese gangsters, and two young bohemians in a thriller more interested in discussing the role of art than delivering high-octane delights.

            Unsurprisingly, then, Diva is just plain beautiful to look at. Shot compositions are painterly, and Beineix’s emphatic use of color throughout the film offers impressionistic sequences that make the viewer feel like they’ve been stuck in a museum for far longer than they’d intended. In a quiet moment halfway through the film, Jules courts Cynthia as they walk through the Tuileries Gardens outside the Louvre. In one of my favorite shots of the film, Jules and Cynthia sit facing away from one another, on different sides of the frame. Jules moves closer to her, transgressing the boundary that divides them, and she smiles. Cynthia, the eponymous diva, is initially reluctant to engage with Jules, a lowly postman, but is so persuaded by his charms that she can’t resist. It’s a beautiful sequence that manages to offer narrative development while highlighting the philosophical interests at the heart of the film.

            I find it hard not to read too deeply into this postmodern dichotomy on display both here and in other threads throughout the film. Jules, the young French sophist bootlegger, courts Cynthia, an American classicist. The police are chasing after a tape that ultimately indicts their chief, but that tape gets confused with the bootlegged recording. The film cleverly – and constantly! – tricks the audience into thinking they’re hearing the commentative, diegetic score to the film, only to pull the rug out from under the viewer and make it clear that the characters are hearing the same noise. Worth noting, too, is how the film’s score expertly blends opera, classical, tabla, and cornball ‘80s synth into one amazing soundtrack. Likewise, the abundant references to both the French New Wave and Hollywood low-brow films that are peppered throughout neutralizes critical discourse in a way that postmodernists will surely love. Its influences all over the place, but Beineix combines them into a singular vision.

             Amid all the philosophical treatises and dissertations in Diva, the film never gets too heady and still manages to deliver a solid caper. There are twists and narrative contrivances aplenty, and there’s a certain, undefinable quality to the characters that makes them just eminently watchable, even if some of the characterization leaves the viewer wanting. Diva marked the beginning of a new micromovement in French filmmaking – the “Cinema du Look” – which is often criticized for being a movement more focused on delivering style before substance. I struggle to see how that critique applies to Diva; this is a film that is rich with thematic interest, impressively timely sociopolitical discourse, and bundles of style. It’s got an aura all its own.

-          Harry Todd

The Earrings of Madame de…

There’s quite a following for this terrific film, which I saw for the first time earlier this week, and I can certainly understand why – I’m pretty sure I just saw a masterpiece. Director Max Ophuls has crafted an absolutely exquisite tragic romance, light and breezy at first, but as it starts to accumulate more and more details and the triangular relationship at its center becomes more complex, the meanings imbued in every line, in every glance, (and certainly in every camera move) start to take on more significance and the film turns serious indeed. Much has been made of the fluidity of the camerawork, and rightly so – Ophuls’s camera roves around rooms, follows a character’s gaze, or moves from floor to floor, but always with a purpose, to show the flighty nature of Madame Louise de… early on, or her frantic worry later in the film. Performances by the three leads – Danielle Darrieux as the disaffected and flirty wife, Charles Boyer as her husband, and Vittorio De Sica as the would-be suitor – are also spectacular. I’ll take this film’s suppressed passions over those in just about any film of unrequited love. And the film’s design - its mise-en-scene if you’ll pardon the film geek terminology – is as dazzling as the camerawork, all baroque mirrors reflecting the characters and their social trappings of lace and glass enmeshing them in the roles they’re expected to play. And here’s where the earrings come in – at first they’re a tossed-away symbol of the marriage that doesn’t seem to be working, but each time they change hands, they’ve accrued a new level of meaning for both the viewer and the character giving or receiving them. It’s a lot of layers to pile on to what could’ve been a simple love story, but Ophuls’s film never collapses under the weight of his ambitions. I’m not ready to call it the greatest film ever made, as some film critics have, but I’m open to the idea that it’s a possibility.