Clémenti to Obscurité

La Brune et moi (“the brunette and me”) is a 50 minute film which explores French punk in 1979, showcasing several bands that were dominating the scene back then.

I’ve been meaning to watch it since discovering Edith Nylon and Taxi Girl over a decade ago, but I was too slow on the uptake to notice it was available on YouTube all this time, and for a while on Henri—Cinémathèque française’s free VOD platform.

Most of the music in this feature is actually pretty great, but it is unfortunately punctuated by a low-effort screenplay about a notorious (at the time) groupie called Anouschka who decides the time is ripe to be exploited by a businessman in return for a music career.

Bizarrely, the businessman in this puerile flick is played by none other than Pierre Clémenti. I heard his career had been derailed following conviction and imprisonment for drugs offences in the 1970s, but I had no idea the event was of such Granville-Paris Express proportions that the trajectory had taken him from Belle de jour to something as tawdry as this.

Nevertheless, La Brune et moi does offer an interesting look at how punk counterculture was playing out in Paris back then—something the media in the Anglosphere largely ignored—and for that alone, it’s worth a watch.

Actually… not for that alone. You need to see Pierre Clémenti in this. You really do.