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France Today, Feature >>
Arielle Dombasle
Amor Amor
This French star's latest album revisits her childhhood---in Mexico.
There's a hint of the Freudian about it: little girl loses mother, leaves home as a teenager to lose herself in big-city excitement, becomes famous and fabulous, one day recognizes that a void has been left unfilled, and artistically revisits her youth to find the answers.
That's essentially how it all happened for French actress Arielle Dombasle. She was born in Connecticut to French parents(her father had business concerns in the United States), and the family moved to Mexico when Arielle was very young---her maternal grandfather was the French ambassador to that country. Her seemingly magical childhood would soon be tragically, horribly interrupted by the death of her mother from cancer when Arielle was only 11---leaving her grandparents charged with her upbringing. She set out for Paris, perhaps seeking some distance from the pain of the tragedy.
The rest is glittering history: a venerable career in French cinema, a postmodern-fairy-tale marriage to superstar philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, a life of prodigous glamour and excitement.
I was to meet her in Bemelmans Bar at Manhattan's swish Carlyle Hotel---a place, curiously enough, a lot like Arielle herself: stylish but affable und unpretentious, trendy but classical, sophisticated but not at all haughty. She'd sgreed to talk about her new CD, Amor Amor, in which she explores the music of her south-of-the-border upbringing. Before her arrival. our bartender was already going on about what a "lovely lady" she was, and upon our inroduction I was, indeed, taken as much by her genuine warmth as by her ethereal beauty. Tall and preternaturally svelte, she moved with the grace of a lioness, that mysterious countenance and those haunting eyes swimming in a mane of silken blond locks, yet her smile and easygoing charm were utterly disarming.
Fighting back my understandable infatuation, I proceeded to ask her about the emotional backstory of her newest project.
"The idea was to go back to what really structured my soul and my heart," she explained, "the boleros of the '20s, '30s, '40s. I was raised in Mexico, and my parents wee listening to Prokofiev and Mozart and Handel and Billie Holliday. But on the radio was bolero, merengue, cha cha cha, and our cook was always crying. And as a child I could sense the incredible emotion of popular Mexican songs. So I wanted to go back to something very simple: the soul and the heart and the sadness of those very melodramatic, melancholy songs that made me cry wehn I was young."
She went to study opera in France and admits that, fearing nonacceptance from the Paris intelligentsia, she even tried to cover up her past.
"I think [I was] afraid of misunderstandings," Dombasle recalled, "of the narrowness, of expectations. I'm such a weird person...so I thought I'd better be more low profile. But I discovered that you can be vunerable and sensitive and weak and people will like you as much."
Amor Amor is Dombasle come full circle, her attempt at finding artistic reconsilliation with a past that she'd willfully tucked away. What you notice immediately is the album's complete lackof guile; the songs---an engaged meld of French elegance, Latin American fire and old Hollywood glamour and insouciance---are not at all preciously packaged for a modern audience (her "Rum and Coca Cola" is as easily as fun and exhuberant as the Andrews Sisters' version). Instead, she treats them with a loving earnestness that evokes the heyday of glorious Tinseltown musicals. Nor does she get showy with her opera-trained voice, but lets the songs themselves decisively hold the spotlight. To her own astonishment, the French just ate it up.
"It was so fantastic not only to reveal the sensitive and profound and melancholic side of myself," Arielle divulged, "but also to find that people loved it. I could never have expected that. But I think that they connected with it because there is so much emotion in that music. You just have to do it with an inner sense of beauty and knowledge, combined with sensitivity and vunerability."
Vunerability! Not something that the beautiful and famous genrally excel at. But in the end, one has only one's heart to answer to. Arielle has done just that, it seems, with Amor Amor, reconnecting with a time in her past that had probably never ceased haunting her.
Would that emotional healing were always this sexy.
Ken Scrudato, a fool for faintly aloof mademoiselles who can quote Marx, writes for Black Book, SOMA, Travelintelligence.com and more.
07/30/06
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