“Between documentary and fiction, the crude and the coded, contingency and devices, in short, between the raw and the cooked, there has always been a short-circuit, a striking short cut, impurity.” This is how Serge Daney described in 1980 the singularity of great French cinema. Forty years later, Chanson triste is a great film that proves him right. Raw: for a year, Parisian baroque singer Elodie Fonnard has taken in and taken care of Ahmad, a young refugee who has come to France to save his own life. Cooked: before Louise Narboni’s camera, Elodie and Ahmad re-enact their life together: cutting vegetables, preparing for an interview with the O ce for Refugees, sharing their respective cultures, Elodie’s songs and Ahmad’s poems. Ahmad’s life inspires Louise and Elodie to a musical programme, which the film develops alongside the relationship between the singer and
the young poet. At once an at-home musical, a political melodrama and a documentary study of a sentimental fling, Chanson triste reinvents the lyricism of the romantic and modern great lied: the expression of feelings moves us deeply, because their outpouring is at the same time emphasised and contained by the form – rhythm and melody. (C.N.)
