The mysterious singer from France
Starting from the second, each clip of the most famous singer of France is more like a short film. And none of these films is like the other. It was thanks to these clips that Farmer became truly famous in France and in the world.
One of the highest paid artists in France. One of the most famous French women. A woman with an angelic voice, whose songs and shows are very far from piety. Childfree, sex bomb, poet, singer – this is Mylene Farmer. On September 12, 2021, she turned 60 years old. And it seems impossible to believe, as she has as much energy and is just as ready to shock the public as before.
Frenchwoman with bad French
Mylene didn’t like it very much in France. The guys at school and on the street teased her for her accent, for not knowing some details of everyday life. In general, they constantly made her feel like a stranger. True, Mylene was an ethnic Frenchwoman and the daughter of a native Frenchman, but she was born in Canada, where her father, an engineer, came with his family to work.
There were harsh winters in Canada, and the hood of the car could always be crushed by a moose. Both added expenses to the family budget, but morals were freer and easier. Mylene spent the first eight years of her life, as now, in France. These 8 years seemed to her surprisingly carefree.
Mom was very worried about her daughter. Normal teenagers go out with friends and go to the movies or on dates. Mylene went to an orphanage in her free time. She wasn’t looking for new friends there, she was just a volunteer. During the holidays, Mylene was vacationing with her grandmother outside the city.
Grandma had horses in the village, and the girl just adored them. She signed up for horse riding classes and even thought about doing equestrian sports professionally. However, she also liked painting and performing in front of the public with amateur musical numbers…
Another reason for concern is that Mylene was a rebellious kid. That is, she preferred the appearance and types of activity that were considered more suitable for boys. And if she disappeared with a company on the street, it was a company of boys.
In the 70’s, there was a lot of talk in France about how important it was for a teenage girl and her family to accept her developing femininity and sexuality, so that a mother could not perceive her daughter’s behavior otherwise than as her maternal failure.
Moreover, Mylene flew out of school, having studied in the senior class for only two days. While her mom was worried about her daughter’s future, the daughter decided to take the future into her own hands. She rushed to Paris to conquer the capital and, possibly, movie screens in the future.
She found a job that allowed her, saving a lot, not only to eat and live under a roof, but also to pay for theater school. And she herself went through any auditions at the same time. And soon she became a fashion model.
Alas, on the set of several advertising campaigns, the media personality’s career has so far stalled. Cute artistic girls in Paris were like tourists under the Eiffel Tower.
Mom was wrong!
Mylene’s luck smiled when she was 23. Poet and composer Laurent Boutonnat was looking for a performer, certainly a girl, for the song he wrote. Why didn’t he try to do it himself? The song was about lesbian love!
Although the 84th year was thundering in the yard, it was not so easy to find a singer who agreed to sing a song with such a plot from the stage in Catholic France. A rebel was needed to match the heroine of the song. Mylene eventually became this rebel. Oh, no wonder she was born in wild Canada!
However, she did not dare to perform under her real name. The girl changed the sonorous “Gautier” to “Farmer”, in honor of one of her favorite actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood. This choice could also be a tribute to the warmest childhood memories about her grandmother’s farm. Mylene arranged a fashionable fleece on her head and went on stage to recite in a gentle voice about the right to love.
The song instantly became a hit, although the relationship with her mother, spoiled by the departure from school, of course, did not improve. The clip for “Mom”, in which the singer jumped in a nightgown and poured sparkling cosmetic glitter tears, became a real hit on television.
Mylene built her entire career on music videos. Each was shot as a short film with a plot or in the art-house style, and together with the song it made up a single whole work. It was the clips that turned Farmer’s new compositions into hits every time.
Two years later, Farmer released her first full–length album, after three singles. Mylene shot a video for one of the album’s songs, “Libertine”. For this video, she dyed her hair a wild red color. In modern French, the word “libertine” has become a complete synonym for the word “wanton”, but in general, initially this term meant an adherent of ideas about the liberation of society from prejudice, including gender.
Libertines, for example, could wear men’s clothes and shoot duels.
In Farmer’s clip, her heroine leads exactly this lifestyle. In the song, despite the defiant chorus “I’m a hooker! Everyone wants me!”, the theme of the thirst for freedom is also traced, intertwined with an inexplicable feeling of sadness, even a fracture. Quite predictably, Mylene again demonstrated the curves of the body, as in the first video – but now they are not covered by anything.
Either this circumstance, or the spectacular clip, or the complex mood of the text was played, but the clip did not leave the top of the music video for three months, and the song became an absolute hit. A few years later, Farmer filmed the continuation of the story shown in “Libertine”.
The theme of free love and the right to choose a partner, standing erect red hair and provocative appearances on screens have become a recognizable calling card of the singer for years to come. Needless to say, all the lyrics of her hits were extremely provocative. When lesbian love or a free relationship stopped shocking, Farmer found other hot topics. The combination of challenging lyrics and the gentle, innocent voice of the singer created a sharp effect every time.
One of her latest albums (2018) is called “Disobedience”. That is, the singer has not been cheating on herself since the eighties, and still has not bored the public. Almost unbelievable!
Personal life of the audience’s favorite
It would seem that having shown almost everything that is possible in her clips, Farmer couldn’t achieve greater frankness with the viewer and is absolutely transparent to the public. In fact, Mylene claims that art and personal life never interfere, and, having bared herself for filming or performing (in whole or in part), she still seems to have never bared her soul. There are constant rumors about who she loves or loved. And these rumors are growing precisely because there is no exact data.
For example, many are sure that Boutonnat was Farmer’s lover. They collaborated for two years, and it was during these years that the sensual image of the singer in show business developed. Is it really not a hot romance that has become the main reason for this sensuality beating from the screens? Mylene firmly denies such assumptions. She assures, they were connected with Boutonnat only by a musical project, exciting with its prospects and exciting with new horizons.
However, the journalists found a number of indirect confirmations that if Farmer and Boutonnat had only friendship, then with something that is now called “benefits”. That is, with a periodic intimate relationship. Farmer’s other lover is called the British singer Cilla, with whom she happened to record a song once. Journalists are also confident in her romance with her partner in the thriller “Giorgino” – American Jeff Dahlgren. Indirect evidence is considered to be the short period in her life when Farmer went to live in the USA.
Mylene recognizes only one affair, a long and vivid one, with the film director Benoît Di Sabatino. This romance was accompanied by so many unexpected twists, which were closely followed by the press, that many believe it to be no more than a production to attract attention (and, perhaps, Farmer’s real hobbies – after all, she has repeatedly touched on the topic of same-sex love in her work).
Anyway, when asked about her personal life, Mylene coolly replies that he lives with a capuchin (and this is a monkey, not a monk). It is unlikely that the situation will change radically. The singer did not form the habit of getting married, and even in her youth she declared herself a childfree, confirming with her whole life that this was not a fleeting whim and she was not going to have children.
At 60, the topic of children, it seems, could be completely postponed, but nowadays the news is full of reports about the children of stars who were carried out for money by other people’s women. Anyway, Farmer met her sixtieth birthday a year ago not lonely, but free. Her life is still going on energetically. In the summer of 2021, she participated in the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, and in 2023 she plans to hold a concert tour.
Clips we love Farmer for
The French star has already fulfilled her dream of appearing on movie screens, and more than once. Her track record includes two thrillers, and in both she has the main roles. In addition, she voiced Princess Selenia in a series of cartoons about “Arthur and the Invisibles”. And yet her main works are short clips, in which Farmer tries on new images over and over again. These images have already accumulated a fair collection.
Tristana
This movie was shot in Russian. Both the main character and all the other characters speak with such a strong accent that sometimes the words can barely be made out. In France, the clip was played with French subtitles. Tristana is the stepdaughter of an evil queen, with whom a young soldier is in love.
There are battles (clearly copied from the First World War), and the events of the fairy tale freely mix the fairy tale “Snow White” and the revolutionary events of 1917. Perhaps a partial prototype of Tristana was Princess Anastasia, who, according to one of the legends, was saved from execution by an affair with the red commissar.
For a complete stunning effect, the video sequence is supplemented with a real chronicle with Lenin’s speeches, and three Cossacks of the evil tsarina are opposed to the seven dwarfs who saved Tristana. The clip also features a scary monk, who is clearly molded from the figure of Rasputin.
At the end, Tristana dies under the portrait of Karl Marx, covered in blood. Then very long credits follow. The song that sounds in the video has almost no meaning and seems only to be the soundtrack to the short film.
Plus grandir
Farmer’s second clip was a video dedicated to the fear of the passage of time. According to her plot, Mylene’s heroine comes to her own grave, and then, as if in her memories, mystical pictures unfold. In them, farewell to childhood and frightening adulthood are represented by the process of breaking the doll, the attack of dwarf nuns (who look like “shrinking” in the eyes of a growing student of Catholic school teachers) and rape. The adult girl finds herself in the mirror immediately aged, and the grave, thus, is the final point of her growth.
Fuck Them All
In this mystical short film, the singer arrives on horseback at a mysterious castle in the snowy mountains of Romania. There, in a room full of ravens, she remembers her own death in this castle, after which she finds her corpse and…takes out a sword from it. With this sword unsheathed, she goes out to meet the army. Only this army is not moving anywhere and consists only of scarecrows.
The heroine is still fighting the silent army. Each defeated scarecrow turns into a raven, and when the field is cleared, the heroine plunges the sword into the ground until the weapon disappears completely. This clip, at the level of symbols, talks about the same thing that the song says – to hell with those who make a battle out of love and cripple lives!
Désenchantée
A clip in which Farmer has never undressed and generally plays a boy. It is believed that it is inspired by a Romanian book of the thirties and the student unrest in Mylene’s childhood. According to the plot, the hero, played by the singer, finds himself in a strange factory, more like a concentration camp. It is guarded by people in Nazi–like uniforms, and all the workers of this factory are street urchins, some of them are crippled.
The guards constantly beat up the little workers. In the end, Farmer raises a rebellion and leads the boys to freedom. They manage to beat up a certain number of guards and break through machine gun fire. But behind the factory fence, a blizzard, a snowy desert and complete uncertainty are waiting for the young rebels.
It cannot be said that Farmer is organic in this role. Despite her fragile figure, which allows her to try on the role, Mylene shines from the screen with full makeup with thick eyeliner on her eyes. In general, her reincarnation is conditional, but the clip itself still looks like a full-fledged movie. As for the song on which it was filmed, it is about the fact that the Farmer’s generation is disappointed and does not see what to rely on. All the ideas seem to be a hoax.
