What is Adieu Vinyle, with Isabelle Adjani, worth this evening on France 2?
Isabelle Adjani as a singing diva of the 50s, Barbara Pravi and Jacques Bonnaffé dominate this adaptation of a detective novel by Boileau-Narcejac by Josée Dayan.
Initially, there is With a lost hearta detective novel by Boileau and Narcejac (a duo who have often inspired filmmakers: The one who was not For Devilish by Clouzot, From the dead For Cold sweat by Hitchcock…), published in 1960 and which was adapted for the big screen the same year: Murder in 45 rounds by Etienne Périer with headliners Danielle Darrieux and Michel Auclair. At the heart of the story set at the end of the 1950s, we find Eve, a glamorous star of French song at the height of her glory but threatened by the strong arrival of the young yéyé generation and divided between two men: her husband, author of songs who made his career and his young pianist lover. A story of a ménage à trois which turns into a tragedy when, following an altercation, the lover kills the husband and tries to pass off the murder as an accident. A ploy that seems to work for Eve begins to receive singles every day with… the voice of her deceased husband announcing that he is going to report them to the police.
Who is behind all this? This is the central question ofGoodbye vinyl, a TV movie where manipulators and manipulated are often the same. But if this police thriller knows how to handle its effects and its twists and turns, it unfortunately suffers too much from its staging (Josée Dayanthe queen of audiences with Captain Marleau) and a photograph (Kika Ungaro, the cinematographer of numerous episodes of Marleau and the TV film on Jacqueline Sauvage with Muriel Robin) in which we perceive the desire to offer a baroque, strange, almost fantastic climate to the story but without managing to find the right dosage, creating on screen a straitjacket which many of the actors in the rich cast (one of Dayan’s signatures) struggle to escape through outrageous compositions which sometimes turn into involuntary comedy.
And yet Goodbye vinyl deserves our attention. Precisely, by the performance of the actors who manage to transcend this climate. Obviously starting with Isabelle Adjani, the interpreter of Eve, a fascinating heroine because she is caught at a turning point in her romantic and artistic lives and which the actress composes with a unique aura and assumed gentle madness. And this without crushing his little comrades. Because for her first steps in front of a camera, Barbara Pravi, the interpreter of So which earned him second place in the 2021 Eurovision contest (who also gives voice nicely on songs by Benjamin Biolay) bursts into the screen in the role of Eve’s young upstart competitor ready to do anything to succeed and knock her off her pedestal. And the immense Jacques Bonnaffé delivers a gently empathetic composition not devoid of malice in the role of the commissioner in charge of the investigation and great admirer until Eve’s blindness. This trio alone justifies venturing out to discoverFarewell Vinylthis evening at 9:10 p.m. on France 2.
By Josée Dayan. With Isabelle Adjani, Barbara Pravi, Jacques Bonnaffé… Duration: 1h30. Broadcast on September 18 at 9:10 p.m. on France 2
