In March 2002, he returned to the stage at the Olympia, after twenty-eight years of absence. Rehearsals, backstage, breaks in the privacy of his home studio, a replica of his apartment on Boulevard du Montparnasse, in Paris, cluttered with curiosities, photographs, paintings, posters, figurines, jukeboxes, vinyl records , pin-up…
It’s an impressionist encounter offered by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia. They worked like cats to capture these fragile moments, in the halo of spotlights, red and blue lights; or completely extinguished, drawing a white silhouette, overexposed, irradiating on a black background, like a negative which, today, takes on a spectral character – Christophe having died on April 16, 2020 from a lung disease, at the age 74.
No comments or questions. Only the music, the words of the songs – or those that Christophe agrees to deliver – maintain this feeling of proximity that the film establishes through the discretion, the slow movement, the brushing and the blur of the camera.
List of films and childhood
Voice test, guitar test, silence, small annoyances. In the saturated lights of the stage, marmoreal face, rare gesture, sharp gaze of a bird of prey hidden behind round smoked glasses, Christophe fascinates as much as he escapes us. Suspended in the contemplation of each of his poses, we welcome the slightest confidence as a gift. There are few.
His history ? He tells it while solemnly recounting the long list of films that accompanied it: Breathless, The Beautiful American Girl, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Crash, Beauty and the Beast, The Time of Gypsies, Blue Velvet, Women’s Perfume, The Truth, Mouth Watering, Les Valseuses, Star Wars, Psychosis…
His childhood ? He talks about it sitting on the floor in his dressing room, while he cuts the neckline of a t-shirt with scissors. “My mother was a seamstress, did you know that? », he says, avoiding any unnecessary phrase, but attentive to the little things that make beautiful things. Maniac, esthete, slightly aged dandy who puts kohl in his eyes, brushes back a lock of hair ten times, treats himself to a glass of champagne. Before entering the stage, dressed entirely in black.
The pieces heard in rehearsal, then, extend into the sparkle of a grandiose night. “That way you held yourself/ Against the lapel of my off-white tuxedo/ I never found it/ And the sun goes down/ On my ruined memory” (La Dolce Vita, 1977, words by Jean-Michel Jar). The voice tears through the darkness to the sound of the instruments – guitars, bass, drums, piano, percussion, saxophone, accordion, cello… –, and Christophe… definitely hypnotizes us.
