Chronicling the rich 55-year transatlantic back story behind one the most beloved, bombastic, glorious, melodramatic, best-selling songs ever written, My Way is an effortlessly enjoyable dive into pop music history. Directors Thierry Teston and Lisa Azuelos present their starry joint project an an actual biopic of Frank Sinatra’s signature autumnal anthem, with Jane Fonda providing voice-over narration as the song’s self-aware consciousness. Fortunately there are so many dramatic twists and famous faces here that the directing duo mostly make this fanciful conceit work. Premiered in Cannes, this lightweight but generally engaging French-made documentary screens this week at Mediterrane Film Festival in Malta, and should find a healthy future audience based on its celebrity cast and universally popular subject.
The original French blueprint for My Way was Comme d’Habitude (“As Usual”), a much more downbeat break-up ballad co-written by singer Claude François, lyricist Gilles Thibaut and composer Jacques Reveaux. In the late 1960s, as a pre-fame songwriter for hire in London, future rock superstar David Bowie penned an early set of English-language lyrics for the song, renaming it Even a Fool Learns to Love, but the publishers rejected his pitch. In response, Bowie wrote his own roaringly dramatic early hit, Life on Mars, based on a similar melody.
But it was Canadian singer-songwriter Paul Anka who struck gold after buying the rights to My Way from its French publisher, reportedly for a dollar. He then added English lyrics about a world-weary man looking back on his life with defiant, chest-swollen pride. By personal request, Anka tailored these words for his friend Sinatra, who was planning his retirement after one last farewell album. He did indeed face his final curtain, in 1971, but soon grew restless. In the mid 1970s he began touring and recording again, partly in response to the huge career-reviving success of My Way. The song became an obligatory live fixture for decades afterwards, to the point where Sinatra became sick of it.
Fortunately for the film-makers, two of the song’s original authors, 83-year-old Reveaux and 82-year-old Anka, are still around to share their memories on camera. François and Sinatra also both appear extensively in the film in archive footage, with Bowie making a couple of brief cameos. Other artists who have performed the song over the decades, or even written songs about My Way in the case of veteran cult art-rock duo Sparks, appear in a revolving background chorus of commentators and experts.
My Way is a testament to one song’s pan-generational power and adaptability, evolving from bitter French ballad to triumphalist all-American anthem, karaoke classic, wedding fixture and funeral standard. Along the way it has inspired thousands of cover versions from artists as diverse as Elvis Presley, Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Willie Nelson, the Gipsy Kings, Robbie Williams, Nina Simone and Sid Vicious. Even if the punk singer’s rowdy demolition job was an inconoclastic stunt, it served as a witty satirical critique of the lyric’s puffed-up arrogance, earning warm praise from Leonard Cohen and others. But Simone’s kinetic, splenetic jazzy reworking is the the most radical inclusion here, and really leaps off the screen.
Bum notes? My Way has a few. But then again, too few too mention. Well, maybe just a couple. For a start, too much of the film’s slender runtime is spent on the recording of two new versions of the song, by Clara Luciani and Ben Harper, both expertly crafted but anodyne, superfluous affairs. Meanwhile, a macabre subplot about a string of 21st century killings in the Philippines, triggered by substandard performances of My Way in karaoke bars, deserves its own stand-alone documentary. Apparently an extreme new form of music criticism, these murders certainly merit deeper cultural analysis than Teston and Azuelos can muster.
Some deeper insights into the song’s political and social dimensions would have been welcome too. For example, it is pretty clear why its core message of macho individualism has long appealed to murderous tyrants and alpha-male narcissists, from Slobodan Milosevic to Vladimir Putin to Donald Trump. But cringing footage of Anka crooning My Way for a smirking Putin, complete with personalised boot-licking lyrics, demands much more critical unpackimg than it gets in this entertaining but overly polite film.
Directors, screenwriters: Thierry Teston, Lisa Azuelos
Cast: Jane Fonda, Paul Anka, Jacques Reveaux, Ben Harper, Clara Luciana, Gabriel Yared, Sparks
Producer: Patrick André
Production company: High Sea Production (France)
World sales: Mediawan Rights
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (David Bowie sidebar)
In English, French
78 minutes
