Comedy and melodrama in twenty-first-century French ‘has-been’ films

The author analyses a corpus of four contemporary French films focusing on ageing singers who enjoy a professional or personal rebound when they meet a younger protagonist: Quand j’étais chanteur/The Singer (Xavier Giannoli, 2006), L’Air de rien (‘Without a Fuss’, Grégory Magne and Stéphane Viard, 2012), Souvenir (Bavo Defurne, 2016) and Guy (Alex Lutz, 2018). All four films draw on the conventions of different genres (comedy, romantic comedy, musical and drama) to explore the real or simulated ageing of their stars, depicted as a source of both ridicule and melodrama. While these films use satire or pastiche in order to make fun of the supposedly old-fashioned institutions of popular cultures embodied by their characters (ballroom dancing, Eurovision, the Top 50 hit parade), they also play on nostalgia to elicit empathy towards the protagonists. By portraying their heroes and heroines as beautiful losers struggling to stage their comeback, they frame their efforts to avoid an ineluctable decline as tragi-comic.