Divine Comedy's French 'Alfie'
Feb
1
Written by:
Friday, February 01, 2008
We were poking around on various video-sites trying to find for footage of a certain Irish popstar being cringeworthy on French TV (acting like an eejit, murdering the language - stuff we all like to see). Unfortunately, we haven't found it yet - and it's worth it, so we won't spoil the surprise for if/when we eventually dig it up.
(And no, it's not Damien Rice, who generally gives good French-language TV interviews which have all, alas, been removed from the interweb. Is there a conspiracy?)
What we DID come across, though, was the video for The Divine Comedy's 1996 French version of 'Alfie'. It's called 'Comme Beaucoup De Messieurs' (translation: Like Lots Of Gentlemen), and it's a duet featuring the Francophile Neil Hannon and a well-known French comic actress called Valérie Lemercier.
The French lyrics tread similar ground to the English original, though Hannon's character is chided for being bookish ("You quote Boris Vian, Camus / Your nose stuck in your songbooks"). There's an Alfie reference thrown in too.
Now, your Francophone Paris correspondent doesn't like to look down on the language problems of others - but we'll just point out that Hannon's French really isn't good enough to sing without cog notes (just like the ones you used in your Leaving Cert). We know this because at the Divine Comedy's 2006 Paris show he had trouble getting past 'bonsoir' and his terrible French was the running joke of the night.
(Hannon currently features in another Franco-Irish duet: a version of 'Favourite Song' with Vincent Delerm, from the latter's live album of the same name. Hannon, struggling with the French lyrics, loses the plot halfway through and the pair burst into laughter.)
Lemercier (left) had her own album, the kitsch-pop 'Chante', out around the same time as her duet with Hannon. More recently, she wrote and duetted with TV talent show winner Christophe Willem, runner-up in our Best French Songs Of 2007.
She's a fine comic actress, though she tends to appear as the same slightly deranged character in a lot of her work. That said, her typically frenetic perfromance stole the show in a gentle 2007 rom-com called 'Fauteuils D'Orchestre', for which she won a César film award during a ceremony she was actually presenting.
No awards here for quality of the footage - or of the singing: