Alizée sings Saint Teresa - the music video
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sequel |
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Referential art has always been with us, but perhaps never before has the artistic mash-up been in greater vogue. The proposed video exploits this modus operandus, both with respect to Alizée's own work and those of other artists.
The theme of the video continues - but mitigates - the anguish of un passé brisé begun in Idéaliser, with the protagonist following a humble occupation - not really seule sur le sol, but very far from the glamour of Coco et Andy she once knew in Fifty-sixty. Yet relief comes from an imaginative ecstacy which transcends what on the surface appears to be a very ordinary life.
Saint Teresa is a song first performed by Joan Osborne as the first track of her smash hit album Relish, released in March 1995. For singing Saint Teresa, Osborne was nominated for "Best Female Rock Vocal Performance" at the 38th Grammy Awards. If the lyrics of Idéaliser are dark, the lyrics of Saint Teresa are downright morbid, with only the thinest veneer of ambiguity protecting the feelings of sensitive listeners. On March 5, 1995 Jon Pareles described it in The New York Times as
a mournful, mandolin-flecked waltz in which Osborne sympathizes with a streetwalker and drug userAs the lyrics themselves warn our favorite tropical breeze
...wind is full of trashBut the music video was constructed so that it in no way reflects these notions. Instead, it depicts a prosaic young woman leaving her sleeping partner in the morning to commute to a job cleaning hotel rooms, where she encounters miraculous experiences. So when the lyrics say
When I make my money, got to get my dimewe now comprehend them as semantically redundant, and not how scoring a "dime bag" motivates the pursuit of money. The only trash is that which needs to be removed from the dirty hotel room.
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If possible, I would like to see Joan Osborne in a single cameo shot. In the original video, Joan (as room cleaner) punches in via a timeclock. Instead, I would like to see Alizée (as room cleaner) arrive one minute late, as evidenced by a clock on the lobby wall. She is mildly scolded in pantomime by her business-suit-wearing boss - who happens to look just like Joan and taps at her watch while she frowns and maybe shakes her head in disapproval. Hey, at least it is better than having wet laundry thrown at you!
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The eponymous song makes many references to the
ecstatic
visions of
Saint Teresa of Ávila
(Sainte Thérèse d'Avila) - not Lisieux.
Art historians observe that Teresa always loved music and found it so worth while a part of religious life that she introduced it into the reformed order, into both the daily recreation periods and the recitation of daily offices. Surely the song JBG made Corsican references because of the Corsican "Bond girl" in OHMSS, (daughter of the Unione Corse capo!) who uses the name Tracy rather than her given name, Teresa, introducing herself to Bond with the explanation that Teresa is a saint; I'm known as Tracy(Visible from the southern tip of Corsica, an Italian town in Sardinia of 5,000 called Santa Teresa Gallura lies across the Strait of Bonifacio. It so happens it was also the shooting location for another James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me.) Saint Teresa closely studied Francisco de Osuna's mystical Third Spiritual Alphabet. But we have no evidence she set bookmarks at each of the "J", "B" and "G" pages. - for the initials of Jesus, her protégé (Anne of St.) Bartholomew, and her spiritual director Jerome Gratian, le bon dieu!) |
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Casting Jérémy as Alizée's sleeping partner is an obvious move. Aside: Teresa's father, Alonso Sánchez de Cepeda, was of half-Hebrew heritage, as I have read is Jérémy, who was born the midnight-based-day (Friday) the first Jewish Sabbath began after Saint Teresa's feast day that year.
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Perhaps it surprises some people that in her affluent youth, Teresa might have much appreciated the creations of Lagerfeld and Chanel, writing: I started to wear beautiful clothes, and to want to appear elegant, I looked after my hands, my hairstyle and my perfumes... Teresa is the Matron Saint (among other things) of people with migraines. Her own recovery from illness is attributed to prayer to a saint who happens to share the name of Alizée's father. The saint may not have been "higher than the moon" as the song lyrics have it, but one person testified seeing her self-levitate a half-meter for a half-hour. In the proposed music video, this invites a short cut scene of Alizée reprising her "miraculous" L'Alizée aerial feats each time the haunting phrase "higher than the moon" is delivered. (The nun's habit or Fée Clochette wings are optional, of course!) |
One should set the fictional venue for the Alizée video in Barcelona, doing the exterior shots of the automotive commute to work there. (Is CGI practical?) The city happens to be exactly half-way along a straight-line trajectory between Ajaccio and Teresa's birthplace, Gotarrendura. Alizée could find some amigos there to help.
It would prove extremely easy to attach the Barcelona signature to the video because of the numerous architectural works of the late Antonio Gaudí which feature in the city landscape. (Because of rheumatism, Gaudi underwent water therapy - although without benefit of any fish, red or otherwise.) Gaudi's many fanciful and colorful structures run circles around the comparatively sober and boring castles of Fée Clochette's current employer, Disney. (Certain Air Outre Mer painting designs are not far from his spirit.) While Gaudi was a Catalan nationalist, he was no extrémiste à deux balles. Instead, he was a devoted Catholic who has sometimes been called God's Architect. It is usually conceded that Gaudi's masterpiece is the yet-unfinished church La Sagrada Família, which some claim has an "almost hallucinatory power".
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Postscript of 2011 March:
When this concept was first outlined in
May 2009, we had written:
Featuring... [the church] ...in a video might commercially leverage the enhanced publicity it will receive when a portion of its interior is opened for public worship and tours around September 2010. (Could even Mylène do better?) That opportinty is now lost, because The church was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI on 7 November 2010 in front of a congregation of 6,500 people... A further 50,000 people followed the consecration Mass from outside the basilica... |
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In the original music video featuring Osborne, an implicit comparison is made between the physical ecstacy of sex and the religious ecstacy referenced through St. Teresa. Osborne is hardly the first (or last) artist to make this connection, not a little inspired by what St. Teresa herself wrote in her autobiography, The Life of Teresa of Jesus:
I saw in [the seraph's] hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...Hou-là-là!!! (Je sais que cette hymen durera longtemps???)
| In The art of ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw (Taylor & Francis, 1970), Robert Torsten Petersson writes: "Bernini's Santa Teresa in Estasi... was she Cupid's victim resting in erotic languor? ...one tract of the times accused Bernini of pulling a pure virgin down to earth and making her into a prostrated, prostituted Venus... Two well-known French responses are those of le Président de Brosses who thought the work suggested a bedroom scene, and of Stendahl who rises to the pitch of Quel art divin! Quelle volupté!". |
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One should observe that intermingling the religious and the erotic is a "cardinal" feature of the ouvre of Madonna, whom a certain Corsican artist much admires. It also is a key feature of a recent blockbuster film which sealed the international stardom of Audrey Tautou (whose fabulous destiny is connected with Alizée both through the latter's song, Amélie m´a dit, and remarkable goldfish which either talk or attempt suicide.) Dan Brown, who authored the book on which this movie was based... |
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...wrote an
earlier book
in which the famous Bernini statue of St. Teresa's encounter with the
seraph forms a critical part of the narrative. The
film version of this earlier book is being
released as we write this.
Of late Teresa has been elevated as the first (tie) female Doctor of the (Roman Catholic) Church - admittedly, not as revolutionary as recognizing the Gospel of Mary as canonical, but then life is not a Dan Brown novel. |
Above, Ecstacy of St. Teresa (1647-52) by Bernini.
Right, Cupid and Psyche (c. 1638) by van Dyck
It is hard enough to "cover" another artist's work. So perhaps it is asking too much to do more. But as suggested above, new possibilities emerge if Audrey Tautou is available and willing to participate in a cameo role. Should one call this the "Amélizée" strategy?
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For example, when Alizée goes to pick up a supply of linens from the closet as did Joan Osborne in the original video, things can be a little different. She can accidentally bump into another cleaner doing the same thing - Audrey - or should we say Amélie, who obviously got tired of working at the Café des 2 Moulins. The video remains preoccupied with Alizée of course, whose messy hotel room seems to bear a vague resemblance to the party room in the music video for Mademoiselle Juliette. One suspects that the vegetation which miraculously grows in the room tends to make it look like maquis, and so it is not so strange to find sheep (so common in Corsica!) paying an indoor visit. But when Alizée sings the final line of Saint Teresa...
Every stone a story, like a rosary
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...we rapidly cross-fade to the hotel room which "Amélie" is cleaning and watch her discover that the last guests have absent-mindedly forgotten their cryptex - known in a certain story as the keystone and protected within a rose-decorated box. A small reproduction of DaVinci's The Last Supper can be seen somewhat defocused over her shoulder, hanging on the distant wall. Audrey picks up the cryptex, knits her brow in puzzlement for a moment, then shrugs her shoulders and casually tosses it into the trash. The final shot shows the cryptex disappearing into the hard trash bin as the tinkling sound of breaking glass is heard. |  |
It is interesting that one of the last lines in the lyrics, viz.
tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me
repeatedly echoes the predicate (m´a dit) in the title of the song
Alizée previously sung about Amélie. If Saint Teresa is sung
almost completely in English, this might be the opportunity to sing an entire,
very passionate, line in French - as if the depth of the emotion makes Alizée
forget to sing in a foreign language.
I think Joan Osborne is a very tough act to follow, although more than one person has tried, as demonstrated by the video playlist* below. I am dumbfounded why the music industry has not made better use of her truly remarkable voice. But I still hope the Corsican fairy would be interested in exploiting the many artistic possibilies which the music video format presents for this timely and personally appropriate project.
* The second performance in the playlist reworks the lyrics and adds a choral chant to transform the song into a more devotional religious piece.
| Postscript of 2010 January: It is interesting to use Googe Trends to study the Internet traffic for the three terms "Alizee", "Alizée", "Audrey Tautou". Find the results here. "Alizee" always dominated the other two terms by a large margin, except for a brief peak in "Audrey Tautou" during the premier of the film The DaVinci Code. It is also interesting that save for that movie premier and the debut of Alizée's album Psychédélices "Alizée" and "Audrey Tautou" basically tracked one another over the inclusive year 2005 and 2008. |
