I’m not a Wes Anderson buff, so I don’t know if the hubbub surrounding “The French Dispatch” accompanies all his films. Or if every time he gets a guy to sing a period piece as a period singer he talks the guy into recording an entire LP in character as a “companion piece” to the film, even though the resulting songs appear neither in the film nor on its soundtrack album.
The character is Tip-Top, a fictional ’60s singer in a fictional ’60s city, singing an actual ’60s French hit. His voice is supplied by Jarvis Cocker, the eccentric British singer best known as frontman for Pulp back in the last century. He wrings every drop of emotion from “Aline” — a huge hit in 1965 for French singer Christophe — which plays on a jukebox in Le Sans Blague, the café where Zeffirelli (Timothèe Chalamet), a leader of a ’68 student protest movement, pines for Juliet (Lyna Khoudri), who disagrees with every word he says.
If you were expecting the official video for the song to feature that scene from the movie — or any scenes from the movie — you’re not a Wes Anderson buff either. It’s the animated sequence that accompanies the opening credits, which also summarizes the episodic plot and includes lots of detail that invites playback at half-speed.
Cocker’s album, “Chansons D’Ennui” and billed to Tip-Top, doesn’t stick to the film’s chronology, instead surveying French pop music across several decades and in several styles. Cocker has lived in France for years but confesses his spoken French is atrocious, so he hired a dialect coach to improve his pronunciation. “I wanted it to be a kind of sincere love letter to French pop music,” he told the LA Times, so that “a French person listening to it, they wouldn’t listen and think, ‘Oh, that’s disrespectful’ or ‘That just doesn’t make sense.'”
The LP, Cocker’s first solo venture in 12 years, is getting good reviews, and it’s a lot of fun for what could have come off as a novelty album. Here he covers “Paroles Paroles,” a 1973 bossa nova-flavored hit for Dalida that featured film heartthrob Alain Delon.
