The rehabilitation of Romy Schneider

As two film biopics of Romy Schneider are announced, it looks like Germany is finally reclaiming one of its most troubled daughters

BY: KATE CONNOLY [Orginally published Sept 2009]

The death of one of the German-speaking world’s best-known female actors could hardly have been more prosaic. Romy Schneider was found by her partner Laurent Petin, in their Paris apartment, sitting lifelessly at her desk. Slumped over the arm of her chair, an empty bottle of red wine in front of her, she had started to write a letter to a women’s magazine to cancel an interview. Her words broke off mid-sentence, the result of a heart attack, probably induced by a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. It was May 1982 and Schneider was just 43.

It is a scene which will be re-enacted in two film versions of the actor’s life due out next year, one called Romy, starring Jessica Schwarz for SWR, an affiliate of German broadcaster ARD, the other, Warner Bros’ A Woman Like Romy, starring German soap star Yvonne Catterfeld.

Variety magazine has described the Austrian Schneider as “a magnet for film-makers”. But it was not ever so. Germany is celebrating what would have been her 70th birthday this week and the commemorations, marked by the usual coffee table books, DVD re-releases and film posters, stand in stark contrast to the way the German-speaking world used to perceive her. She was viewed as something of a traitor for turning her back on Germany.

Unlike Dietrich or Hedy Lamarr, who both shunned Nazi Germany and were never fully forgiven for doing so, the younger Schneider’s “crime”, like many German stars before and since, was simply that she chose to make her fortune in the tougher but more lucrative film studios of Paris and Hollywood, where of course the most beautiful lovers also resided, rather than in the Germany of the economic miracle era.

The height of Schneider’s fame came with the hugely popular Sissi trilogy of the 1950s in which she played the 19th-century Bavarian princess who went on to became Empress of Austria. She later starred as a more mature Sissi once again in Luchino Visconti’s 1972 film Ludwig about the life of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

She once complained: “Sissi sticks to me just like oatmeal.”

Indeed the Sissi roles somewhat overshadowed some of her other – arguably more memorable – film appearances, including Clive Donner’s What’s New Pussycat, Orson Welles’ The Trial and Jacques Deray’s The Swimming Pool, one of several films she made with her erstwhile lover Alain Delon.
Her early death certainly contributed to the mythical perception of her as the tortured woman of German film. After all her private tragedies certainly towered above the dramas in which she starred.

From the start her life was overshadowed by German history. She was born Rosemarie Albach in Vienna to her actor father, Wolf Albach-Retty, and her film-star mother, Magda Schneider. From their house they could see Hitler’s holiday domicile, Obersalzberg, where the Fuhrer received them, later declaring Magda to be his favourite actress. Romy would later claim her mother and Hitler had had an affair. It is perhaps no accident that she went on to play many Nazi-persecuted Jews.

She met Delon in 1959 and lived with him for five years, until one day he left her. His farewell note read: “Gone to Mexico with Natalie.” She slashed her wrists in response.

In 1966 she married the director Harry Meyen, a depressive due to the torture treatment he had received at the hands of the Gestapo as a “half-Jew”. He later hanged himself.

Her second marriage to her secretary Daniel Biasini ended in a divorce battle in 1981. She had an operation to remove a tumour on her kidneys, and then in the same year her 14-year-old son David punctured his femoral artery when climbing an iron-spiked fence at his step-grandparents’ home, and died.

“I’m just an unhappy 42-year-old woman and my name is Romy Schneider,” she said in one of her last interviews.

It has taken years since her death for Germans to fall in love with her. Two years ago she was voted Germany’s favourite actress by German broadcaster ZDF, and now, in time for her 70th, so many picture books and biographies have emerged that it seems her rehabilitation is almost complete. Next year the Filmmuseum on Potsdamer Platz will stage a glitzy Romy Schneider retrospective, complete with her costumes and jewellery.

It just goes to show that if you want to be loved, dying a young and tragic death helps no end.

Source: Kate Connolly: The rehabilitation of Romy Schneider | Film | The Guardian

Why You Should Binge-Watch “Plan Cœur” on Netflix – Frenchly

Netflix’s newest French addition, Plan Cœur, by Chris Lang and Noémie Saglio, has evoked a strong reaction (as expected) from the French audiences. The French have mostly ridiculed it as a binge-worthy, feel-good show (makes sense when most of their movies have far from happily-ever-after endings). But we would like to point out… what is so wrong with a binge-worthy, feel-good show?

A sort-of French take on Sex and the City, Plan Cœur (or The Hook-up Plan in English) focuses on the lives of three Parisians: Elsa, played by Zita Hanrot, Emilie (Milou), played by Joséphine Draï, and Charlotte (Chacha), played by Sabrina Ouazani, who each have their own struggles, daily battles, and inner conflicts. The main character, Elsa, has been chronically single for a while and still getting through a very rough breakup. Her friends, naturally, hire a male hooker to lift up her spirits. What happens after is a surprise for everyone [ . . . ]

Continue at FRENCHLY: Why You Should Binge-Watch “Plan Cœur” on Netflix – Frenchly

Is France Showing Us What America’s Next Civil War Will Look Like?

“Everything I’ve seen so far out of France is singing loudly that, yes, it’s a small world, after all – and that what’s happening on the barricades is both a reflection of what’s going on in much of the developed world and a screaming alarm for what could come next.”

It’s October 2021. America is in a state of turmoil – so much so that the ongoing felony trial of disgraced former president Donald Trump seems only a footnote. The chaos of the 2020 election has meant no honeymoon for Beto O’Rourke, the 47th president, whose narrow win over the GOP’s Nikki Haley (the Republican convention in Charlotte having rejected President Pence) had only enraged both the right and an increasingly angry left, which was still insisting that Democrats had cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination at their divided, brokered convention.

Still, President O’Rourke had small Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, and – after a summer of record heat waves had left more than 250 dead in the Los Angeles wildfires and seen Hurricane Gigi swamp many of the same New Orleans neighborhoods that had been inundated by Katrina – the charismatic, Kennedyesque chief executive had convinced Congress to pass, by exactly one vote in each chamber, a 40-cent-a-gallon gas tax to promote solar and wind power and subsidize electric cars.

Within hours, angry truckers had parked their rigs across the entrance to every tunnel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. In small towns across America, protesters – encouraged by Sean Hannity on Fox News and by fake stories on Facebook that the O’Rourke administration planned to reopen Trump’s Texas detention camps for immigrants and use them to imprison tax resisters – gathered at gas stations. Many of their rallies were infiltrated by the political fringes – neo-Nazis of the right and Black Bloc anarchists of the left – and there were scattered reports of violence. In Charleston, S.C., a CNN reporter was reporting from a full-blown riot when gunfire was heard in the distance, just a cannonball shot away from historic Fort Sumter.

Paris is burning.

You’d think the rapid decline of Western civilization would get more news coverage in America – normally, flaming barricades in the shadow of the iconic Arc de Triomphe and hundreds fleeing tear gas in the heart of the French capital might be considered must-see TV, especially when the other option is a panel of aging Watergate prosecutors – but the latest chess moves in the Trump-Russia scandal and the embattled White House continue to trump most other headlines [ . . . ]

Continue at COMMON DREAMS: Is France Showing Us What America’s Next Civil War Will Look Like?

Jain: Artist You Need to Know

Jain
Jain

French singer mixes pop, Afrobeat and more influences in a winning combination

t’s a chilly October night, yet Jain has packed the mid-sized Brooklyn venue Warsaw with a mix of New Yorkers and visitors from her native France. Over there, she’s a phenomenon: Her 2015 debut, Zanaka, which blends pop with Afrobeat, is certified diamond, and her follow-up, this year’s Souldier, hit Number One on the country’s albums chart. The 26-year-old regularly plays multiple nights at venues like Paris’ historic Olympia and Marseilles’ Le Moulin, and she’s opened for Seal and Christine and the Queens. Here, though, it’s clear she knows how to work a slightly smaller crowd.

With a striking concert presentation and a set list full of dance-floor movers, she gets the crowd jumping, dancing and singing along. She does it all while alone on the stage: Like a DJ, she has a podium where she controls her music — loops she creates in real time, sometimes using a remote-control gauntlet she’s woven into her blue jumpsuit that looks like a high-tech Wonder Woman — and she’s enfolded herself in video screens and lighting arrays of pure color.

“You wanna be a staaaar, but you don’t know who you are,” she sings amid jittery synthesizers and a hip-hop beat on “Star,” off Souldier. Based on how confident she looks, it’s hard to imagine she’d be singing about herself.

Although Jain sings in English and is a smash across Europe and Canada, she’s still working on making a dent in the U.S. The video for “Makeba,” her song praising the late South African civil rights activist Miriam Makeba, earned her a Grammy nomination, and the song appeared in ads for Levi’s and Mitsubishi, but she’s still proving herself here. Judging from the Brooklyn show, she’s beginning to turn the tide. That’s partly because Souldier, with its rap and Arabic influences, reflects who she has become since her last record as much as where she’s come from.

“I wanted to talk about women, the star system and the technology that surrounds us and people that are trying to sell things all day long,” she says a couple of weeks after the Brooklyn show. Her voice sounds both confident and optimistic. “[Souldier] is a little bit more adult and engaged, and it’s mostly about our modern society.”

Jain has a unique view of the world, mostly because she’s lived all over. She was born Jeanne Galice in Toulouse, in the southwest of France. When she was nine, her family relocated to Dubai for her father’s work in the oil industry, which also took her to Congo and Abu Dhabi. It was in Pointe-Noire, Congo, where she lived from ages 12 to 16, that she began making music. Her big sister started playing guitar and taught her a few chords. Jain wrote “Come,” a catchy, acoustic foot stomper, and met a local producer who called himself Mr. Flash. He helped her make what she remembers as a “really cheap” recording of the song, and she uploaded it to Myspace. “I sent this demo to every major record company in France, and I had only one answer,” she says. “It was from the person who became my manager.” (She pays tribute to the man who kickstarted her career on Souldier’s “Flash (Pointe-Noire).”) [ . . . ]

Continue at ROLLING STONE: Jain: Artist You Need to Know – Rolling Stone