Bertolucci, Brando, Biolay – Négatif (2003)

Like a vampire
You would wake up a dead person
And your bite is worth all melee,
Worth all the stretches, all tangos of time

Benjamin Biolay, Glory Hole

French master-composer Benjamin Biolay’s second album Négatif (2003) is a devastating demonstration of his divine elegance, but also of his substance. It is an undeterred response to his highly acclaimed debut- Rose Kennedy (2001) had been no lucky first strike, and Biolay’s natural drive for grandiose orchestrations and twisted, gloomy beauty was far from having reached its climax. It is a cinematographic masterpiece and, unnoticed to this day, a musical homage to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Tango in Paris.

Négatif is a magical album that changed my life a bit back when it came out: by articulating an existential but fleeting mood in word and sound, and making it accessible for the duration of this album. There is no salvation, but we are condemned to our turbulent and destructive selves. Since the day of its release, this mood has been categorically added to my inventory of truths, and it came to stay. Like an ancient wisdom imposed on you naturally and without a choice, a prophecy as relentless as breathing.

The cover photography, defiant with a touch of pride and accusation, is a timeless Dorian Grey-like image mirroring the final words concluding the album: “Mais mort ou vif, je reste négatif – But dead or alive, I’ll stay negative”. Which statement could be more definitive? We refuse the promised path of salvation, and, brutalized by life and our condemnation to ourselves, we submit to the self-destructive path of sex and death. Biolay has succeeded in making a most exceptional album about the existential state of ‘negative’ as fundament to everything, and with all its facets of shatterdness and glory; streamed by an unusual conciousness, and without all irony. The Empire of Négatif beyond all clichés and inherited by brutal and vulnerable male characters such as Marlon Brando’s ‘Paul’ in The Last Tango in Paris.

Starting with the first song ‘Billy Bob A Raison‘, Biolay picks up Western motives and the Steel guitar on his second album- it is despite all variety from Pop to Eno his most ‘American’ record, just like Brando’s Paul is an American in Paris. Free of a cultural burden, on these particular songs Biolay delivers a beautiful and timeless reinterpretation of folk and country, taking the lament away from it and giving it grandeur, like on ‘Negative Folk Song’. Ingenious in this context is also the use of an original recording sample of the Carter Family at different speed, which can be consistently heard as a choir throughout ‘Little Darlin‘ ‘. “I was obsessed with Jimmy Rogers. This guy influenced Hank Williams, Elvis, The Beatles. It was not complicated from a genealogical point of view to go back to Jimmy Rogers.”, Biolay explains.

‘Negative Folk Song‘ is also one prime example for the twisted and perverted lyricism of Biolay: ending like a lullaby with a lovely music box sound, it reveals itself as deception in a sugar-coated low-frequency hysteria: “Music Box / My condition is critical / I need a sabbatical year / Music Box / To do my self-criticism / To build the bomb and live it up / From the Olympic Basin”.

Great art has the ability to alter the faces of perception, internal discourse, and its own form. ‘Glory Hole‘ is a crude incantation of the flesh, a poetic heightening of anonymous sex through holes in walls, it is a vampiric interpretation of the ‘glory’ in ‘hole’. “I like your bitter skin / Your smooth skin in an iron glove / I like going in the wall / All tastes are in nature / Glory Hole”.

Like Brando in The Last Tango, Biolay allows us to step into a sphere of raw emotional violence and passion beyond all conventions and post-modern awareness. Sex is not just a physical stimulant anymore, and its sensational acts do not take place under the rainbow, but in the cellars and undergrounds of fathomless depth. Brando refuses to know anything about his lover, not even her name, and Biolay transports this direct reference into the anonymity of glory holes: “I like your skin, your hands / Your sweet hands of which I do not know anything … Nothing but a dog’s life” while in the end giving an explanation of what drives him- it is not the shallow fulfilment of impure thoughts, but their disappearance in the acceptance of his negativity. “Do you like my venom? /…/ It’s your desire / And it’s my despair / My impure thoughts / That you make disappear / In a whisper”. And it is that very surrender which is part of that force which wills evil and produces the good in a Mephistophelian manner. Negative is the only way in order to feel.

“Like a vampire
You would wake up a dead person
And your bite is worth all melee,
Worth all the stretches, all tangos of time”

Biolay makes his most apparent reference to The Last Tango in Paris in ‘Chère Inconnue‘ (“Dear Stranger”), and the song is everything an homage should be: a continuation, a change of perspective, the continuing exploration of the original piece of art. It is an imaginative letter from Brando’s Paul to his nameless young lover Jeanne (Maria Schneider), in a gentle introspective that Paul never shared with us- it is the entire film in a single song. Everything is in there in detail: Paul’s lonely state of despair and grief after his wife’s suicide (“If only you knew that a numb and disappointed love quivered, unbeknownst to you“), the suddenness and intensity of how these two crash together (“Would you happen to have taken possession of my life, of my sight, in some unknown land?“) , the apartment in which they meet and make love („This avenue / This two-piece town apartment facing mine / Which turns you into my target, my beautiful“), Jeanne’s clothes („You who never goes out without your dear overcoat /…/ your flesh-colored stockings“), her young boyfriend who is a filmmaker doing a film about their life („Had I known that you were easy, I would have come instead of that imbecile living on the story about you“). Biolay thematizes the two lovers’ anonymity within deepest intimacy („Dear Stranger, I know nothing of your marital status, born to an unknown father, at the end of some street“) as well as the intensely subtle reawakening of Paul’s loving and hope („I want your off-white skin, for the rest of my life“) which tragically ends with his death.

Completely unregarded by critics, Biolay adds something essential to Bertolucci’s classic. He articulates that which remains unspoken and implied on screen, and gives it a musical language and mood. And so are Brando’s last glances and words when he chases and tries to convince his rejective lover not only the expression of an unhinged passion, but also the resume of a life:

Dear Stranger,
I didn’t know it, but life
Is the sum of many blunders
And a single point of view

And this avenue
Had some quiet days
Before your arrival, which makes me irascible
My dear Stranger

Négatif culminates in the grand final, the title song with the strangest heart-rate, a testimony of pure pain and despair from a tormented soul. It is the relentless redemption of a bold and fearful surrender to his nature and negating forces. “Faced with the extent of my sorrow / I will swim naked in the Seine”, the French river which here stands for the turbulent flow of ones critical excesses and destruction, and a purification in the untamed bath within the own misery and defectiveness. It is the great beauty. More cinematographic conductor than tortured artist, Biolay takes us on a deranged trip dressed up in divine orchestrations and melodies of gloomy beauty. In this twisted and demented journey colors get brighter and senses sharpen as in every madmen’s dream.

I am boisterous
I am negative
…
I’m drained of my blood
Too emotional
…
For my soul is only torments
I am nothing but a primitive man
…
I am a child
So fearful
…
But dead or alive,
I remain negative
Since everything goes
To hell

I love Négatif for it is opulent in sound and emotion, yet stripped down to the bones. It is tender and vulnerable, at the same time ravaged and perverted. I love Négatif for it suffers with a raw appropriateness untouched by Freud, pure and painful, determined. Chests swelled with the tired pride of tragic ridiculousness and the silent rage about our damnation to lifelong amateurishness. A masterpiece within the last tango, ‘Négatif’ purifies and brings unity of the soul.

by Saliha Enzenauer