“I don’t know how to please, it’s a whole skill. The chorus appears on Clara Luciani’s second album ‘Coeur’. It is also one of the great emotional moments of his triumphant tour which ended in style a few days ago in Paris at the Accor Arena. The piece slips into “It starts like that”, a documentary available since Thursday on Prime Video which tells the story of the 30-year-old singer’s path full of pitfalls.
If everything smiles on her now, it was not always the case, as she tells it in front of the camera of Philippe Lézin. Certainly, today, there are the Victoires de la Musique collected, the chained TV sets, the unleashed concerts. But before that, there is a childhood that is both joyful and painful. The happiness of a loving family, the misfortune of ruthless classmates.
At 11, she sells all her toys for a guitar
Precious images immortalized with a camcorder testify to this, Clara Luciani was tall, very tall for her age: 1m73 at 8 years old. We think she is late, because necessarily older, we make fun of her. “I was the ugly duckling, I built myself around the unloved of the school”, she remembers, when she returns to her primary school in Martigues where she grew up. Failing to seduce by her physique, she will bet on her clowning skills inherited from her grandfather, her hero. “He was my star. He had the charisma, the elegance. I wanted to entertain like him. »
Music begins with her father Jean-Marc, a rock fan and singer in a group with whom she shares her first chords after selling all her toys to buy a guitar at 11 and pretending to be Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders. His family archives are the strength of the film, which moves from the present to the past, from childhood to working in the studio on his latest album and preparing for his tour. Between the two, Clara’s laborious beginnings as a singer, within the group La Femme then solo in small venues such as the cabaret “Madame Arthur”.
Some believed it, some didn’t. “I remember a producer who said to me: I really don’t see what you find in him,” recalls his artistic director. Final opinions that inevitably make you smile when you measure the progress made and the work accomplished. And it is indeed hard work when we observe the singer hard at work on her future hits “The rest”, “Respire encore”, grope, doubt, even worry when she does not find the solution for “Heart”. Not to mention the genesis of “La Grenade”, subject of dozens of versions before finding the right one. And start to please. Really.
« It starts like this », documentary by Philippe Lézin (2023). 90 minutes