Work was his life – and his passion: Charles Aznavour
Photo: Antoine Agiudjian
Some chapters from the life of Shahnourh Vaghinag Aznavourian, born in Paris in 1924, who became a world star as Charles Aznavour. The first is called “two guitars” and gives the coming a good two hours. A melancholic search for traces of the lost time, according to the sources of the outrageous productivity that Aznavour has honored as a singer and actor. Music, it becomes clear here, was always the link between yesterday and today, between life, love and death.
The parents led a modest Armenian restaurant in Paris. Or more precisely: Every now and then another, even smaller and easier when the previous slide was done. The young Charles Aznavour, who grew up in the Bohemeviertel Quartier Latin, knew very precisely what poverty is. From then on, his will to become successful was always associated with the idea of making a lot of money. When he later meets Frank Sinatra in New York, he says that his goal is to get the same (astronomically high) fee for an appearance as this. And he actually achieved that. Aznavour had all the advantages and weaknesses of a person who worked up from the bottom.
Aznavour died in 2018 after being on stage two weeks earlier (at the age of 94). Work was his life – and his passion. I had experienced him in Berlin a few years earlier. He was in excellent shape, physical, mentally, vocal, but still radiated an enormous distance, almost hostility to the audience. The announcement came before the start, if there was a flash from the audience, he would stop the concert immediately. Nobody doubted that he would really do this. No, the old Aznavour no longer looked love for the audience, he had experienced too many ups and downs to want everyone to please everyone. The way he sang his melancholic songs (he wrote and composed and composed his melancholic songs), as always with a large orchestra and participation of family members – and yet only as for himself.
The moody favor of the audience, which he had born around for so many years, apparently no longer interested him. “Monsieur Aznavour” by Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade, which was also co -produced by the Aznavour family, also says of it. This is a feature film as a tribute, but a reputation noteworthy because it does not make the price of fame.
Love songs should only sing a beautiful man, and he was not, he was often told in the 1950s with blunted directness.
A few years ago, an unusual Aznavour documentary came out-loud private film sequences, from him with his own 8 millimeter camera over the course of many years. Aznavour knew that advertising was half a success. But just half. Woe, you fail when everyone is looking at you! The family was always around him, his sister was probably closer to him than his three wives. And yet Aznavour’s son Patrick took life in 1976 (at the age of 25) – a wound that never closed, as we know from self -testimonies.
The film was produced extremely elaborately, with a lot of sense for the right ambience. But does it work if you occupy the incomparably energetic Aznavour with an actor like Tahar Rahim? Only half, because Aznavour was not like this sporty, but in an inadequate manner, with a more mental than sensual charisma.
Love songs should only sing a beautiful man, and he was not, he was often told in the 1950s with blunted directness. In fact, Aznavour did not fit into the cliché picture of a French chansonnier. He was only 1.64 meters tall and had a somewhat hoarse voice, unsightly, but expressive. So before half empty halls he played in front of an audience that didn’t like him. Then why does he keep working, after all, success actually forces? Later Aznavour will romantize this barren time in his chanson “La Bohème”. His life was a “longing dream”, especially during this time: “I was the greatest of the great fantasy.”
Tahar Rahim, who does not sing Aznavour himself, is limited to some typical gestures and facial expressions of Aznavour. However, he cannot produce his inner embers, the sharpness of his mind (who seemed to be in the way of the singer for a long time) does not occur here – so Tahar Rahim’s Aznavour gets something inappropriate one -in -dimension, finally boring.
This happens if you do not have your own idea for a film, you only think something predetermined. But the personality, the inner tension, also ruthlessness of this man, does not transmit itself. Instead, a strange smoothness spreads. The same happens here with Édith Piaf, which at Marie-Julie Baup, from a provocative dirty primeval power, rumbles to a cute decal without depth.
Is that all uninteresting because it is too externally presented? Of course, a Charles Aznavour Chanson says a lot about him (especially since the original music in the film is also fleet). After all, the historical context contributes a lot to gradually being drawn into history. More is told by more than just about his ambition, defeats and fame.
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The Aznavour’s life story begins in Paris in the 1920s and it ends in 2018. What a historical arch! German occupation officers sit in the night clubs of the early 40s; Aznavour is not only arrested on the street once because he is suspected of being a Jew. Of course, that shaped him, giving his songs an unusual seriousness.
In the haze of Édith Piaf, he began to write songs for her in 1946 – the way for him on the big stage is still far. Certainly it was wise to establish himself as a film actor (in over 70 roles!) In parallel. His representation of a failed concert pianist who gets caught up in the criminal milieu, in François Truffauts “Shooting on the pianists” from 1960 wrote film history. Likewise, his figure of the Jewish toy seller in Schlöndorff’s “Blechtrommel” or his Jesuit-fanatic naphta in “The Magic Mountain”. The person Aznavour had so many more facets, more corners and edges, more driven than this, which is certainly charming, granted him.
Why doesn’t a Charles Aznavour, who has been a lot (in the end even Armenian ambassador in Switzerland), does not really come close here? Because it does not dare to take the director of Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade to take the step from the outer life arch to that “world nose room” that for Rilke represents the actual connection between self and the world. There is too much imitation and external pose, but too little explanatory expressions in the game.
What made him become a manic singer of hopeless loneliness in the middle of family and friends? This inner biography, which one would have to find a contour (he), is not told here.
“Monsieur Aznavour”, France 2024. Direction and book: Mehdi Idir, Grand Corps Malade. With: Tahar Rahim, Bastien Bouillon, Marie-Julie Baup. 134 min.
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