At thirteen, he is convinced: love is a bouquet of violets.
With enthusiasm, in front of his amused parents, young Pagny takes up the melodies of Luis Mariano, the king of operetta.
Thus he begins to test his talent.
And it is one of the merits of this documentary to show how a singer becomes aware, little by little, of his abnormally powerful or melodious voice.
At the end of local competitions, the turbulent kid pinches himself:
“Everyone listens to you, applauds you and comes to pay you compliments!”
Too good to be true, he thought.
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His dream realized, his success and his sorrows, his fifteen million albums sold,
Florent Pagny
recounted them in April 2023 in a successful autobiography.
Based on audio recordings of the singer, which allowed Emmanuelle Cosso to put her memories on paper, France 3 is offering a documentary entitled
Florent recounts Pagny
.
A little melodious, necessarily benevolent for its subject but punctuated with interesting sequences, it sketches in small touches the personality of Pagny.
A singer uncomfortable with a pen but happy in front of a microphone, delighted by his popularity, quite rebellious and not devoid of self-deprecation.
Joy at the Olympia
We hear him rewind his beginnings in the profession.
Lyrical arts classes, supporting roles in cinema or television, procrastination about one's future.
Because the young Pagny is neither an author nor a composer, success is long in coming.
He finally arrived with
Anything
, released in 1988. A title found during a night of doubts spent above his piano.
His leather jacket and his nonchalant locks are then on all the televisions.
Vanessa Paradis, whom the song
Joe the Taxi
has just propelled to stardom, falls in love with it.
But Florent Pagny does not continue his momentum.
The wave of success puts him back where it had looked for him.
He has to stay with his friends, sleep a few nights in his car with his bull terrier Ganja.
A good fairy named Jean-Jacques Goldman finally knows how to find the words and melodies that make him loved by the public again.
In 1994, Ganja sneaked onto the Olympia stage: the singer took over the venue for the first time.
An image from the time shows him beaming at the microphone, in front of an electric crowd.
A downside all the same, the documentary does not analyze the artist's discography, between resounding hits and rose-tinted songs.
Florent Pagny agreed to lend his personal video cassettes to France 3. Thus we see his engagement, in 2006, to the Argentinian Azucena Caamaño.
A delighted Kad Merad plays the role of officiant -
"In the name of the father, the taxman and the saint-pancho..."
Another sequence shows him seized by anxiety before a duet with the master of bel canto, Luciano Pavarotti.
Will he succeed in interpreting
La donna è mobile
?
The Frenchman takes the stage and does not deserve anything.
Pavarotti, this quiet force, sings with exceptional ease, which allows him to cover a small false note from his younger brother.
Accent of sincerity
Surprisingly, the role of Florent Pagny in the TF1 entertainment “The Voice”, of which he was a pillar and which brought him part of his current notoriety, is not mentioned.
“Thanks to this, I took on another popular dimension
,” he confided in April 2023 in
Le Figaro
.
“The Voice” is on television every Saturday for four months.
In a transgenerational show.
The kids put a face to the name of their parents’ singer.”
Today, Florent Pagny lives between France and Patagonia, where he raises sheep and can live self-sufficiently.
He is recovering from a painful illness.
The media coverage of his pathology surprised him, he confides, thinking of the thousands of messages received.
He writes, elliptically, in his autobiography:
“I cannot even say whether this story, ultimately, will not have been more positive than negative.”
When he returned to the stage in the summer of 2023, after a first battle with cancer, his
Load-bearing Walls
had in any case a singular accent of sincerity.
Perhaps he had never sung so well.