Hardy’s press excursions introduced her to many faraway locales, from Tehran to Johannesburg to New York Metropolis, the place she as soon as perched atop a Method 1-themed float through the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On her second journey to Brazil, through the pivotal yr of 1968, she befriended her assigned hostess and interpreter, a lady named Lena. Like many others, Hardy had been enchanted by Brazilian music and particularly bossa nova, a languid, sensual offshoot of samba. Her 1968 album, often called Remark te dire adieu, includes a cowl of “Sabiá” (as “La Mésange”) by Antonio Carlos Jobim, thought-about the daddy of bossa nova. The curiosity was reciprocated: That very same yr, the Brazilian tropicália group Os Mutantes included a rendition of “Le premier bonheur du jour,” beforehand recorded by Hardy, on their debut album.
In October 1970, after touring to Rio for a 3rd time to sit down on the jury of the Pageant Internacional da Canção, Hardy determined to make an album impressed by components of Brazilian music, later calling it “one in every of my finest souvenirs.” Lena had launched Hardy to a different Brazilian lady in Paris, the guitarist, songwriter, and producer often called Tuca. The pair put their very own spin on bossa nova on 1971’s Françoise Hardy, unofficially often called La query. Halfway via, Hardy references “saudade,” a Portuguese phrase meant to specific melancholic longing. An essential theme in bossa nova music with no English equal, saudade is a romantic nostalgia for one thing or somebody that can by no means return, or maybe by no means existed. The Portuguese author Francisco Manuel de Mello described it as “a pleasure you undergo, an ailment you take pleasure in.” Hardy and Tuca might each relate.
Tuca’s scenario was strictly unrequited: She was infatuated with Lea Massari, an Italian actress who was not a lesbian. For her half, Hardy had been engaged in an “not possible love affair” with the singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc for the reason that late Nineteen Sixties. In her memoir, The Despair of Monkeys and Different Trifles, Hardy describes her early labelmate and occasional collaborator as an “uncommonly charismatic” man with a “reflexive must flee from any type of dedication.” Hardy, who had struggled together with her self-worth since childhood, was pissed off by Dutronc’s flighty habits and flirtations with different ladies. After innumerable damaged dates and lonely nights, it’s no surprise that the credit of La query checklist one “Pinocchio” as “Catalyseur.”
On the forlorn title observe, Hardy is distraught by the gap between herself and an unapproachable lover; trying to grasp him is like “chasing the wind.” And but one thing, maybe the that means of affection itself, implores her to proceed to attempt: “Tu es ma query sans réponse, mon cri muet et mon silence” (“You’re my query with out a solution, my mute cry and my silence”). Practically a decade earlier, on “Tous les garçons et les filles,” Hardy questioned when she would expertise the bliss of feeling liked. The girl who made La query is aware of the when and the how, however not the why.
