[CINÉMA] Mr Aznavour, intentions and efforts for so little…

It was a particularly anticipated film, and in finehe disappointed us.

Produced by Jean-Rachid Kallouche, the nephew of Charles Aznavour, the project looked promising. At least, no large-scale betrayal would be to be feared with regard to the famous singer-songwriter. Furthermore, if the name of Grand Corps Malade, co-director of the biopic with his friend Mehdi Idir, was enough to puzzle us, we knew that Aznavour, impressed by the film Patients that the tandem had previously produced, had given him the green light shortly before his death in 2018: “It turns out, Mehdi Idir explains in an interview, that he died the day we all had an appointment to launch the production of Mr Aznavour. We put the project on hold, completed La Vie scolaire, before coming back to it.”

Very linear, probably too linear, the film retraces the significant stages of the singer’s career. The story then begins with the young years of Charles Aznavourian, when this son of Armenian immigrants discovered around the age of twelve a vocation as an actor-singer, at the Théâtre du Petit-Monde. Then the story addresses the German Occupation and the risks his family took to hide Jews as well as the resistance fighters Mélinée and Missak Manouchian. Already at this time, Aznavour was looking to perform in the smallest provincial cabaret alongside his comrade Pierre Roche. A friendship that never wavered, despite the unequal paths of the two men. The film by Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade also relates the complex relationship, sometimes warm and sometimes stormy, between Aznavour and Edith Piaf, as well as more painful episodes in the singer’s life, such as the death, in 1976, of his son. Patrick.

Agreed story and bad choice of actor

Nourished by an important research work on the life of Charles Aznavour, which goes from listening to his thousand two hundred songs to reading his biographies, our tandem of filmmakers delivers, ultimately, a work that is far too academic on the narrative plan, right down to the clumsy choice of a chapter, giving the unpleasant impression of having transposed the artist’s Wikipedia page onto the screen and compiled all his known anecdotes. A minimal risk-taking that Grand Corps Malade and Mehdi Idir suddenly try to make up for during the story by the unwelcome and anachronistic insertion of a rap piece – we know that Aznavour, keen to please “young people”, regularly did zeal in the media to promote this “music”…

Even more annoying is the choice of Tahar Rahim to play the artist. A good actor, in absolute terms, who is also voluntary, sincere and hardworking – he himself sings the song in the film – his prostheses never really manage to give him the likeness of Aznavour, whose silhouette and look atypical seem unapproachable. Tahar Rahim struggles, from start to finish, to make us forget that he is hiding behind the character, where Eric Elmosnino was perfectly illusioned as Serge Gainsbourg in the film dedicated to him by Joann Sfar in 2010.

A fundamental subject barely covered

Finally, if the two filmmakers repeat over and over again that Charles Aznavour gave “young people” a chance (meaning those from immigrant backgrounds, etc.), their film barely touches on the deeper reasons for his personal success: namely, the total assimilation of Aznavourian, abandoning an important part of his original identity to not only embrace French culture, but revere his language and pay homage to it, without seeking excessively to disrupt its nature, neither in the grammatical rules nor in the vocabulary. A work of assimilation that the “young people” to whom the two directors refer have not undertaken for a long time… However, we remember the following words from the singer, made in 2013 on RTL: “I became French first, in my head, in my heart, in my way of being, in my language… I abandoned a large part of my Armenianness to be French… It must be done. Or you have to leave”.

In short, the filmmakers remained on the surface of the Aznavour character.

2 stars out of 5