Agnes Jaoui is an actress, director, singer: she is on the poster of the film My life, my face by Sophie Fillières, in theaters September 18, author of the book The size of our breasts (September 11, Grasset) and released the album “Attendre que le soleil revienne” (September 20, Baboo Music), in which she sings with Francis Cabrel in a duet: ” It’s Aurélie, his daughter, who is at the head of the production company of the album, which is entirely in French, but Francis suggested a duet in Spanish “
But before she gets into her busy schedule, she is asked about the chilling news and the six Hamas hostages who were found dead last weekend in Gaza. Two members of her family were killed in the October 7 attacks and three others were kidnapped, and one of them is still a hostage: “What we know is that he is probably in the tunnels, like the other hostages. (…) I don’t think the family is doing very well, I don’t think there’s a single Israeli who’s doing very well right now, or anyone in this area.” she said. “It takes time to understand, to turn anger, despair, into action.“, she said the day after a day of strikes that saw 500,000 Israelis take to the streets to demonstrate.It is a good thing that people have come forward, that they are saying how dangerous and criminal this government is towards the Palestinians but also the Israelis.“.
“The place of the voice in French is difficult”
At the cinema, in “Ma Vie Ma Gueule”, a film by the filmmaker Sophie Fillières, who died last year, “She had asked her children to do the editing, and they did a perfect job. I went to see a montage before it was finished, I went with a paper and a pen to write down my remarks, and at the end, I had written down two words, because the film was already there, it had found its strength“, says Agnès Jaoui, who plays a sort of double of Sophie Fillières on screen: “I had her shoes, her clothes, her rings that I gave back to her in the evening, it’s her real shrink that we see on the screen“.
When Sophie Fillières died, “Le Monde” wrote that the filmmaker was the queen of “stuck word“. How do you play a stuck word?”By not changing a single comma in what she had written“, explains the actress. “I read this script like a novel, like a very good novel, it has such a particular language, so funny.“.
Until now, when she sang, Agnès Jaoui sang the words of others, or songs in a foreign language: “My musical training comes from classical singing, and when you learn classical singing, you sing in German, in Italian, because the place of the voice in French is difficult. Until then, I didn’t know how to sing French. It took me a while to find pleasure in it.“.
