KATE HUDSON AND HUGH JACKMAN IN SONG SUNG BLUE Faux amateurs It's not a good sign when all through watching a new movie you keep thinking of an old one that you like much better. In this case the new movie was Craig Brewer's saga of a tribute band couple, Mike (Hugh Jackman) who does Neil Diamond songs and Claire (Kate Hudson), who's a Patsy Cline specialist. It's a bittersweet, for me mostly bitter, Christmas release that provides unchallenging entertainment for the year's end. The one I kept thinking of and wishing I were watching instead is the 2006 French film
Quand j'étais chanteur,
The Singer, directed by Xavier Giannoli and it too is about a second rate, provincial singer.
The similarity ends there because where
Song Sung Blue, for all its peaks and shallows, of which it has plenty, never goes into any depth, the 2006 French film, which was never released in the US, is subtle and restrained. The singer is played by Gérard Depardieu and this reminds us what a great actor he used to be, which he was again here. There is a love interest this time too and she's Cécile de France, also great here. A third character, a real estate agent played by an excellent Mathieu Amalric - and he has his eyes on Marion (Cécile de France's character) too.
Why the French film works better, apart from having a rising writer-director plainly excited about what he is doing and some of the country's best actors at work on it, is the framework in which the material is cast - with respect and delicacy. "Chanteur" - the French title is "Quand j'étais chanteur," when I was a "chanteur" - doesn't just mean "singer" but refers to a provincial dance band singer. It's understood, and the protagonist gradually has to acknowledge, that not only is he soon going to be over-the-hill (though Depardieu does all his own singing, as Jackman and Hudson do theirs), but the institution of provincial dance bands is itself dying out.
Xiannoli's film doesn't give us any rousing super-star-venue gigs or triumphant performance moments as
Song Sung Blue is continually doing or greedily grasping for, though with ever-decreasing conviction as its miserabilism and accident-prone protagonists struggle to keep going or even stay alive. Alain (Depardieu), Marion, and Bruno (Amalric) just go on living their obscure provincial lives in and around the French town of Clermont-Ferrand. Nothing major will have really changed at the end of the film. In contrast Claire has been run over in front of her own house and lost part of one leg, while Mike has had multiple heart attacks and finally is in his coffin for the final song, performed at his funeral by Claire while their various offspring enthusiastically and weepily watch. Mike's daughter is Angela (King Princess) and Rachel has two kids, Rachel (Ella Anderson) and, my favorite, a bespectacled and enthusiastic boy called Dana (Hudson Hensley, who grooves and weeps equally well).
After Mike and Claire meet and decide to perform together as Lightning (his moniker) and Thunder (hers) and then fall in love and marry, along with exceptional good luck, also have borderline implausibly bad luck. These radical ups and downs are part of a movie that becomes all too much like a conventional musical biopic with its managers and promoters, even though these are borderline amateur performers, she being a hairstylist and he a car mechanic and his manager-promoter being a dentist (Fisher Stevens). It shouldn't matter, perhaps, but it does, that while Gérard Depardieu wasn't primarily a vocalist, Jackman is. Jackman is a notable vocal artist who has done so many singing roles on stage, on tour, and in films. His playing a has-been, might-have-been provincial singer is just a shtick and we wink and watch it. I'm not sure I ever got over that.
Authenticity is what
The Singer achieves and
Song Sung Blue doesn't seek, as the latter also fails to define the music it's exploiting or the activity of tribute band performers. It prefers not to place them in a specific social and historical context. Perhaps this oversight is intentionally committed in fear of alienating the wide audience the filmmakers seek, but they do this at the cost of the subtlety and specificity so often essential to good narrative and good art. "Everybody loves Neil Diamond," somebody says in
Song Sung Blue. But everybody doesn't. Thunder and Lightning get, through one of several magical flukes, to open for Pearl Jam. That's because they're so good! Mike doesn't even know who Pear Jam are. Luckily his daughters are there to tell him that when Eddie Vedder's on the line, he's in luck. Mind you, good things can happen. Eddie Vedder enters briefly, played by John Beckwith. He's one of the film's most appealing characters - why? Because he has nothing to sell. He's just being nice. Nobody tells us "everybody loves Pearl Jam." But
The Singer's assumption, foreign to Brewer's film, is that it can be okay to be provincial and mediocre. We don't have to live and love its music to follow and appreciate the story. In the French film, the story is primary.
Maybe it's not so surprising that Mike is a recovering alcoholic, and Claire will wrestle with severe shallows after her accident and wind up attending her own kind of 12-step meeting, because
Song Sung Blue is about adrenaline junkies flirting constantly with a dangerous longing for a level of achievement they can't have as well as a risky obsession with famous performing artists. In contrast Alain, Depardieu's character, though he knows he's provincial and working in a vanishing job, isn't singing someone else's songs in another voice but everybody's songs in his own.
Yet though
The Singer is based in realism and accuracy about time and place, it finds time for wistfulness and poetry.
Song Sung Blue may shake theater viewers out of their holiday haze, but it's yelling at us all the time, belting out songs, flirting with fame, and crashing into disasters. What I had thought was going to be soothing and fun turned out to be numbing and disappointing. It lacks the subtlety and perception it needed to depict minor performers on the fringes with sympathy. And it assumes an interest in and knowledge of the music that shouldn't have been necessary and it's unlikely to create any new Neil Diamond fans.
You can watch four of Xavier Giannoli's films, including his 2021 Balzac-inspired
Lost Illusions, which won seven Césars, including for Best Film. But because it was not released in the US (I saw it in the series Rendez-Vous with French Cinema), you will not find
The Singer/Quand j'étais chanteur in an accessible American format, and will have to get hold of a non-US PAL format DVD copy to watch it. Should be required viewing for French film fans. It was a Cannes official selection and has an
AlloCiné critics' rating of 4.1 (82%).
Song Sung Blue, 132 mins., premiered at AFI Hollywood Oct. 21, 2025, showing also at Savannah, Madrid and (the film's main venue) Milwaukee, before opening in dozens of countries around Christmas.
Metacritic rating: 61%.
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