She throws : “We are shooting a documentary about my apple. » Yes already. Isn’t it a little too early? Clara Luciani, 30 years old, and barely six years of career. Brilliant, the career, dazzling, certainly. Its beginnings are so close that if you stretch out your hand you can almost touch them with your fingertips. 2017, a first EP, “Monstre d’amour”, first thrills, we discover the songs of a young woman shipwrecked by a toxic love. It reveals the very dark, vaporous and autobiographical “Cry, Clara is crying”.
We listen, something is happening, the other long brunette lady (1.82 m) has something, it seems. The songs we will hear a year later, with the album “Sainte-Victoire” – and the explosive single “La Grenade” –, hit the bull’s eye of the time, feminist and warrior. Clara Luciani embodies it with a smile, but still.
Electric guitar and bangs like Françoise Hardy from the 1960s, the unknown from Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône) sings “Under my bosom the pomegranate”, and it seems that we should not look for it too much. It smells of the tube especially. She was the first part of Benjamin Biolay for a long time, sensitive to her voice “low medium”who advises him to loosen up a bit on stage.
Since then, a second album came out (“Heart”, 2021), the concerts followed one another and the same Clara Luciani ended her tour in triumph at the Accor Arena in Paris. She takes over the stage as a popular, almost old-fashioned star, dressed in a sequined Claude François-style costume. Sing, Clara sing.
The Belgian singer Angèle was also the subject of a documentary, so early, so young. We can’t help but think that if show business wanted to wear down its young talents and risk the public’s overdose, it wouldn’t do it any other way. Brief…
Clara Luciani: “Making a dancing album is almost a political gesture”
The documentary “Clara Luciani: it starts like that”, directed by Philippe Lézin and available on Prime Video from this Wednesday, February 8, is interesting although hagiographic. The singer, author, composer, instrumentalist, ex-member of the collective La Femme, reveals a personality in up and down, sunny and crippled with doubts. Sulky, upset, pugnacious when she doesn’t get what she wants. Especially in the studio, if she doesn’t hear about productions what she hears in her head.
Sometimes you feel or make her feel that she is a woman and that she has to put on armor to face the predominantly male world of the record. We hear it from his mouth: “You say that because I am a woman! ? » Same when she leaves the first concert of her second tour: collapsed on a sofa, she did not feel the public, did not feel herself. An hour later, she is the caterpillar in the dressing rooms with all her team. The doubts in saltire, the ability to recover.
Despite the doubts that torment her, despite a real difficulty in accepting herself in the mirror since the age of 8 (“How can I seduce, since it will not go through the physical? », she wonders then), the foundations are solid. Clara was a beloved child. His parents, Evelyne and Jean-Marc Luciani (singer and guitarist), and his sister (also a singer) testify in the film. Professionally, she found with Ambroise Willaume, alias Sage, the perfect studio accomplice.
Clara Luciani walks on the French stage like a character from Jacques Demy’s films, with an added touch of black. “I write about the things that hurt me”, she says. Behind this success, there is a lot of work and a lot of tears. Obviously.
Clara Luciani: it starts like this, by Philippe Lézin (90 minutes). Available on Prime Video from February 8.
