The "responsible sister": Deceased Artiste Marie-France Pisier

If you look Marie-France Pisier up on the IMBD, you find out only two things about her 66 years of existence. The first is that she was born and lived in Vietnam (where her dad was the colonial governor of French Indochina). And you can learn the size of her chest, courtesy of Celebrity Sleuth. It’s pretty sad that those two facts represent the sum total of her life, but then again, the IMDB is composed of fan-generated material, so what would you expect?

Pisier, who was found dead earlier this week in her pool at the age of 66, was a gorgeous actress who worked on a continual basis in France, but the films she appeared in stopped being exported over here in the mid-’80s (with the sole exception of Raoul Ruiz’s Time Regained). Thus, what I can speak about knowledgably is the period where Pisier worked for noted French directors and made some really bad American crap.

Her obits labeled her a “darling” of the New Wave, which isn’t exactly true — she worked for only two of the movement’s filmmakers. But I guess if Francois Truffaut leaves his wife and kids to have an affair with you, you become a "New Wave darling" in some respect. Truffaut did indeed do that after he cast her in his first 400 Blows sequel, the short film “Antoine et Colette,” which appeared in the feature Love At Twenty (1962). You can see the whole short, featuring the lovely young Mademoiselle Pisier, here:



Pisier had the lead female role in Robbe-Grillet’s stylish and typically dreamy Trans-Europ-Express (1966) and also was one of many haute bourgeoisie acting as if caught in a dream in Don Luis Bunuel’s very non-linear Phantom of Liberty. However, Pisier did more than act in certain films — she also collaborated on scripts and directed the feature The Governor’s Ball (1990).

The first film she collaborated on both behind and in front of the camera was Jacques Rivette’s ultra-dreamlike (are you sensing a pattern here?) masterwork Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). She appears in the "house of stories" sequences where three figures enact a cryptic drama that our heroines are trying to figure out. I excerpted scenes from the film in the Funhouse episode I called “Farewell, New Yorker.” Here is the C&J segment:



Follwing her tremendous success in the popular comedy Cousin Cousine (1975), Pisier appeared in some really campy American soaps. The French Atlantic Affair (1979) and Scruples (1980) have been forgotten by most folks, but The Other Side of Midnight (1977) is a very well-remembered piece of absolute camp silliness. Here is the trailer:



Pisier continued to appear in films with “international appeal,” like French Postcards (1979) and Chanel Solitaire (1981), but perhaps her most interesting performance — especially given her past history with the filmmaker — was her return as “Colette” in the final “Antoine Doinel” film by Truffaut, Love on the Run (1979). Not only did she costar as Leaud’s old love, but she also coscripted with ex-lover Truffaut. The whole film is available on YouTube, but the poster has made certain that the clips can’t be embedded — I guess this helps keep the copyrighted footage up on the site, because he/she has done the same with their other foreign movie uploads, and the suckers have been up there in some cases for years now! Love on the Run begins here.

She made many high-profile pics after the Seventies but, as noted above, we didn’t see many of them over here. One that did appear briefly, but has disappeared over the last few decades (I finally caught up with it on TV5, with English subs) is the star-studded Les Soeurs Bronte (1979, again!), which is Andre Téchiné's surprisingly old-fashioned take on the lives of the Bronte sibs (brother Branwell included). The whole film can be found on YT here, but the version uploaded is in French with Spanish subs.

Pisier plays the sister who lived the longest, Charlotte (thus allowing her to take part in the “is that all?” finale to the film). Téchiné definitely frames the film as a 1940s-style melodrama, thus making it a very fitting companion to the 1946 Bronte pic Devotion with Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino. The thing that makes the pic interesting today, of course, is watching the interaction of the three lead actresses. The immaculately talented Isabelle Huppert (then 26) had already appeared in several major films by ’79, but her turn as Anne finds her going through the least-glamorous process of suffering (and as we all know, biopics like these thrive on the lead characters’ suffering). The radiant Isabelle Adjani (then 24) plays Emily, dressing as a male and acting as idiosyncratic as her “brutish” writing. As Charlotte, Pisier is seen as equally troubled, but still functions as the family’s backbone.

The scene that probably best displays the trio’s interaction is this one (oddly squeezed on YT, but English-subbed) in which Charlotte discovers a poem by Emily and tells her she must publish it:



Adieu, Marie-France.

British — no, Aussie! — humor 6: Tim Minchin

Quite different from “musical comedy,” humorous music is in very short supply these days. Sure, there are “morning zoo” radio shows that still create old-fashioned parody songs based on timely events; there is the sole mainstream exponent of novelty tunes (Weird Al, whom I will defend against all naysayers); and there are also songwriters like Randy Newman, John Prine, Lyle Lovett, etc, who write darkly funny tunes as expertly as they compose heartwrenching ballads. A singer-songwriter who exclusively writes and performs humorous material is a rare bird indeed, but there is one Australian gent living in London who fits that bill superbly, and his name is Tim Minchin.

What Minchin does harkens back to masters of wordplay like Tom Lehrer and Noel Coward, except that Minchin is a self-professed “rock ’n’ roll nerd” (who has written an autobiographical song with that title). His music demonstrates a pretty thorough knowledge of piano-centric songwriters past and present (he’s namechecked Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Ben Folds in his work, among others), and he shares with the comedy-music deity Lehrer the ability to convey a smart social or political truth in the form of a few verses and a chorus. Example:



Minchin clearly possesses the ability to write catchy and touching serious music — see his gorgeous atheist-Xmas tune (below) — but he has instead decided to use his talent to amuse. Before his present incarnation as a performer with a striking appearance (he performs barefoot, in eye makeup, and his “ginger” hair teased) and a strange stage persona that moves effortlessly from impish to positively demonic, he worked as a cabaret-style singer-pianist and also acted onstage in his hometown of Perth.

Minchin started gathering a following at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival in 2005; he won the “Best Newcomer” award at the Edinburgh Fringe in the same year. He has since mounted various one-man shows and also, from what I’ve seen on YouTube (since we Yanks are “locked out” of the BBC website’s streams), has appeared with some regularity on British and Australian TV. He also was involved in an Oscar win at this past ceremony, as he narrated the Best Animated Short of 2010, the Australian short “The Lost Thing.”

Although his stage character seems “uncertain” of what to say at times, Minchin the performer is in complete control throughout his shows. He does intersperse short standup routines (including this crazed piece about anger) in among the tunes, and is in fact quite good at it, but his songwriting is so vibrantly creative that you come away from watching his stuff with his melodies lodged deep in yer brain pan.

I only discovered his work a few weeks back and was delighted to see he’s traveling to America in May to play several dates, including three in NYC that… have already sold out! I’m not sure how he’s acquired a cult over here — either it’s word-of-mouth among Aussie and British expats, or due to an appearance on Conan O’Brien in January of this year.

Before I move on to a survey of Minchin songs that you should definitely check out, I should underscore the two elements of his work that I most enjoy. The first is his ability to deconstruct himself and his persona in his lyrics and performance; the second is the aforementioned ability to convey a deeply held belief through the vehicle of a “funny song.” Come to think of it, the best subversives always have a good sense of humor….

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Let me start off my mini-survey of Minchin’s music with my fave item from him (besides the above-linked ditty), his discourse on religion entitled “Ten Foot Cock (and a Few Hundred Virgins).” This is a clever, tuneful piece that speaks for itself:



The most commonly used topic in songwriting is, of course, love. Here, Minchin directly addresses his lover and comes straight to the point (in an actual music-video!):



In case the lady wants Tim’s “Dark Side,” he’s willing to reveal it in this brilliant piece that bounces genres from jovial piana-playin’ to introspective Pearl Jam-mish angst:



An open challenge by Minchin to religious folks, believers in psychic phenomena, and new-age therapies that finally works its way around to its subtitle (which is a variant on Henny Youngman’s most famous punchline):



A melodic piece that proves Minchin can write meditative songs (serious with a few funny lines) pretty damned well:



And this may seem weird in April, but I wanted to close with the Minchin song that first “hit” me, his serious Xmas song about what really matters about the holiday and what doesn’t, “White Wine in the Sun.” I avoid sentimental holiday music like the plague, but this song appeals to me greatly because it’s genuine and not mawkish:



Those who are intrigued by the above can check out mucho Minchin on two YouTube channels, one put up by a dedicated fan who has collected some great TV appearances and the other put up by Tim himself.

FOOTNOTE: In praising Minchin, I neglected to mention two other practitioners of musical humor whose work I love, the multi-instrumentalist Bill Bailey and the acoustic master of wonderfully funny folk-rock tunes, Stephen Lynch. The work they do is equally impressive in this era when there ain’t any humor at all in popular music.