After a career spanning more than 60 years, French singer Sylvie Vartain said goodbye to the stage with a farewell tour in spring 2025. She became a teen idol as a young girl: she was a “Yéyé”! In France, the word stood for its own pop music genre, derived from the English “Yeah” of the Beat generation.
Other well-known stars of the Yéyé scene were France Gall and Françoise Hardy as well as Johnny Hallyday, who was married to Sylvie Vartain from 1965 to 1980. At the time they were the absolute dream couple of the Grande Nation. Sylvie Vartain could also be seen on the screen, for example in 1971 in one of the great classics of fantastic cinema: “Malpertuis” alongside Orson Welles.
Chansons are the best medicine
In “With Love and Chansons” by Ken Scott (“Big Business”), which is based on true events, the now 80-year-old singer now plays herself because she has had a significant influence on the protagonist’s life: Roland Perez (later as an adult: Jonathan Cohen) was born in 1963 as the youngest child of a Moroccan-Jewish family – with a type of club foot he later described it as “the draft of a foot”. Despite several operations, he is unable to stand or walk. His mother Esther (Leïla Bekhti) does not want to accept the disability and runs with the child from hospital to hospital for years.
But Esther has a mission: her youngest son, who is still crawling around the apartment at the age of six, should go to school alone and on foot. To do this, she asks the supreme therapist – God – for a miracle. Esther actually manages to find a new treatment method. To do this, Roland has to lie in a support corset with lots of laces on his legs for many months in a nursing bed that is set up in the family living room. So he becomes a TV junkie – and therefore the biggest fan of Sylvie Vartain, whose songs he not only knows by heart, but with which he ultimately learns to read and possibly even walk…
Esther may at some point overdo her role as a mother – but Leïla Bekhti remains a revelation right to the end.
“With Love and Chansons” begins as a relaxed comedy – colorful and touching, about a mother who is ready to give everything for her child and a smart boy who obediently lets everything happen to him. This also applies to the slightly older brother Roland, whom their mother initially wants to make a stage star. When she learns that almost all artists are starving, she sends him to high school and later to university instead. Without asking Roland, of course. As soon as Roland grows up, however, the atmosphere changes, because now what he was warned about early on happens: he can no longer get rid of his mother!
The last third of the film is about Roland – now a father and successful lawyer – wanting to finally break away from his mother. This is quite difficult, because his mother still interferes in everything, even in his professional matters. Without there being a real break, the mood of the film gradually turns towards melodrama. Leïla Bekhti, Lili d'Alengy from “Maria Montessori”, plays a super-mother, a woman who doesn't ask much, but does – a paragon of energy and optimism and very endearing. But alas, someone doesn't dance to their tune! What Esther cannot achieve with her temperament and endurance, she achieves with her irrepressible charm.
Leïla Bekhti is a force of nature
As Esther, Leïla Bekhti is nothing less than a natural event, simultaneously lightning and thunder, earthquake and volcanic eruption. As the older Esther, she shows, especially in her movements and gestures, that many years have passed, without exaggerating and without any vanity – that is great acting. Jonathan Cohen as the adult Roland can barely hold his own alongside her. With mostly great calm and gentle irony – especially when he appears as the first-person narrator – he plays a patient man who never had the opportunity to become independent because his mother organized everything for him. Basically, the film, which Ken Scott directed with a great sense of contemporary color and mood, falls into two parts: Roland's childhood and youth with an all-powerful mother and Roland's life as an adult, still under Esther's thumb.
First of all, a comedy is told with a lot of irony in the sixties and seventies, which is very poppy and has a lively soundtrack – pleasantly ironic and full of endearing humor. It is definitely worth considering whether it made sense to film Roland Perez's autobiography in its entirety, which the film is based on. Actually, according to the first thought, it would be much nicer if it had remained the funny, colorful comedy with the Sixties flair – and if the film could end with one of the happy moments from the first half of the film: for example with Roland's first day at school or his appearance as a dancer in a television show with Sylvie Vartain. In fact, young Roland not only comes to love the star from a distance, but also gets to know him personally.
Even after his marriage, Roland (Jonathan Cohen) remains under his mother's thumb.
But the second part also has its charms. Because now the mother, who still harasses Roland, becomes a tragicomic heroine. She can't and won't let him go, whether he's married or not. Certainly the first part remains the stronger, the mood changes, but on closer reflection the second part becomes more and more important.
The tragedy of this mother-son relationship, which spans almost 50 years, becomes increasingly clear, but the humor remains, fortunately, even if it comes across as less fluffy and colorful. At least Ken Scott manages to capture the cheerfully noisy tones of comedy as well as the subdued mood of a melodrama with the same amiable wit.
Conclusion: An atmospheric dramedy based on a true story, particularly played outstandingly by Leïla Bekhti, which begins furiously comically and becomes increasingly serious without completely losing the humor.