Posted 7 Feb. 2023 at 9:39
How to become a successful singer when you can’t stand your image? This is the surprising question posed by this new Amazon Prime Video documentary dedicated to a star of the French music scene. Less ambitious than the two seasons – unsurpassable – of the series on Orelsan ” Never show that to anyone.” “It starts like that” has the merit of showing us Clara Luciani in a new and intimate light in a unitary program of 1h30.
The brunette from Martigues was, from an early age, traumatized by her size and her voice, which made her pass for the “ugly duckling of her class”. Not easy to assume his 1.73 m at 8 years old! It is therefore an artist tormented by the lack of self-confidence and the doubt that director Philippe Lézin follows over two years, from the recording of his second album “Coeur” at the prestigious Studios Ferber in the midst of Covid to his concert in front of more than 15,000 people at the Accor Arena last December.
A very illuminating scene shows her leaving the stage in Nîmes on the first date of her tour, devastated by a performance that she considers shabby. Surrounded by the team of faithful who have supervised her since her solo debut in 2014, she comes to her senses to finally embark on a frenzied caterpillar fifteen minutes later. We measure in passing how much her relatives (her musical half Ambroise Willaume, her former artistic producers of the Initial label which became Romance at Universal Music) had to pay in person to support her during all these years.
Work in progress
The most interesting images are those that immortalize the “work in progress” on certain titles. We were far from the start of “La Grenade” that we all know when the future hit was still only a wobbly piano-voice, before the injection of a kick/bass determining the vitality of the title. If the archival films concerning the heroine’s childhood and family trivialize the general point a little, the images of her beginnings as a singer in the group La Femme are worth the detour and give precious keys to her rise to power. until the perilous concert recently improvised on Radio France, with a symphony orchestra.
Alternately stressed, fulfilled, in tears or all smiles, the thirty-something shares all her moods. ” From darkness to light (“from darkness to light”), as the singer and guitarist of the Scottish rock group Franz Ferdinand, Alex Kapranos, companion of Clara Luciani in the city, sums it up well.
“It starts like this”, 90 minutes, on Amazon Prime Video in France, from February 8, 2023.
