Sound Advice: on “Je Suis Malade”

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve decided to post not the usual songs of love and devotion, but about exquisite romantic misery that can only be borne out of all-consuming love. It’s the kind that’s not healthy for you.

The classic French pop song “Je Suis Malade” was first written and recorded in 1973 by French singer Serge Lama. An overwhelming popular and critical success for Lama, the single brought him his first gold record in France and became known as one of his signature songs. Covered by a whole host of European artists, perhaps the most famous rendition in the modern era remains Lara Fabian’s 1994 version, which became an immense success and a signature song for her, as well.

It is not just a song where the speaker misses someone. The song is a catalogue of all the manifestations in which romantic love creates illness and deprivation. It is not enough for the singer to merely talk about the moon, June and spoon in rhyming couplets. “Je Suis Malade” shows how the singer, translated from the original French to English, no longer dreams or smokes, feels dirty and ugly without the lover, feels abandoned like a child in an orphanage. The romance, for the singer, has no pleasure or joy. There is only despair from an all-consuming love that at once feeds and feeds at the speaker, slowly ebbing joy away, leaving only exhaustion, resignation and a final cri de coeur that commands the lover to listen, and make a definitive declaration of anguish.

For some, it may be overwrought, but this goes beyond the usual romantic sentiments one may find in adult contemporary radio. “Je Suis Malade” is not a romantic journey, nor can it be considered a mere love song. It is the soul’s cry to all the winds, the four directions, the depths of the earth to the limitless outer spaces, that there is nothing more than incurable despair. Love is the devil, love is an all-consuming disease that loves one completely sick. Literally, the word “malade” could be interpreted not just as an illness, but also as a state of fact that the singer is completely heartsick. If you have any compassion at all, you would listen to the rendition by Lara Fabian and beg her to stop or to have someone put her out of her misery but you can’t, for her performance of the single is so singularly emotionally and sonically majestic that you can’t help but listen and wait for the final glory note. 

A popular song across Europe, the single has unfortunately been butchered mercilessly by reality show contestants hoping to become the next (insert country name here) Idol or X-Factor victor. This does nothing to take away from the original song’s potency, nor that of the remarkable cover by Lara Fabian. While it’s certainly not healthy to live the kind of love, it is certainly an antidote to declarations of love by positive affirmation. What other love song would drive one to such despair and yet still announces to the audience, “Listen, this person is in love, no matter how much it hurts them”?

In addition to the version by Fabian, the piece works well as an interpretive dance. Have a look at the free dance for this season for Canadian ice dancers Kaitlyn Weaver and Andrew Poje. Looking at this dance, one cannot help but be swept up in the body language between the two, the anguish and the final pose where she is on the ice, begging him to love her. Weaver’s tears are real and, while you may joke about figure skating, one must not forget that it is itself also an art form and another type of theatre.

With that in mind, consider the next song of love you hear, and wonder if any will compare in its depiction of all-consuming love will compare to “Je Suis Malade”.

Art on Ice: Sarah Meier

Because I wanted to open the New Year with an inspirational post to help you, dear reader, with your New Year’s Resolutions…

When Sarah Meier was growing up, it had been nearly twenty years since her native Switzerland produced a champion figure skater. That would be Denise Bielmann, who had the eponymous spin named after her and who captured the world championship in 1981. The country had produced dozens of world-class skiers and dominated the snow, but not the ice.

Meier at the 2002 Olympics

Enter Meier. At the age of 10 she was doing double jumps and was able to complete triples by age 13. (For reference, when I was 13, I was busy trying to point out the cultural references in the then-new sketch-com series In Living Color. I may not be young, or that athletically inclined as a child.) Coached by her aunt Eve Fehr, her career received ample support from her family and her skating federation. Meier subsequently captured the national figure skating title several times and went onto the junior figure skating ranks, where she performed respectably and medaled in several events.

By age 17, she had competed in her first Olympics and placed 13th. Her career started to peak in 2006, when she finished 8th in the Olympics, 6th at the world championships and captured the bronze medal at the prestigious Grand Prix Final, behind the future Olympic gold and silver medalists Yuna Kim of South Korea and Mao Asada of Japan, both of whom were making their senior debuts after years of conquering the junior ranks. In the next two years, Meier went on to win the silver medal at the European Figure Skating Championships and was a fixture on the international competitive scene.

Meier at the 2010 Olympics

By 2008, things started to unravel. A series of injuries kept Meier from reaching her potential and forced her to withdraw in several events. It didn’t help that the likes of Kim and Asada were soon joined by the likes of Miki Ando, Haruka Imai, Mirai Nagasu and other notable young skaters making splashy debuts on the world stage. By the 2010 Olympics, she had posted a 15th place finish and had sunk to 26th at the worlds just a month later. The long series of injuries took their toll and nearly brought an inglorious end to a once-promising career.

Meier persevered for just one more competitive season, vowing to end her career by winning the Europeans, which were set to take place in January 2011 in Bern, Switzerland. Meier decided it was appropriate to end her career where it began, on home soil, and make it a farewell performance. You can see her performance and the end result after the jump:

Art on Ice: Yuko Kavaguti

Meet Yuko Kavaguti. At one time, she was Yuko Kawaguchi. Let me explain.

Yuko Kawaguchi was born in Aichi, Japan in 1981. A competitive figure skater for Japan, the story goes that she saw the inspiring performances Elena Berezhnaya delivered with Anton Sikharulidze in pairs at the 1998 Nagano Olympics and was inspired to switch disciplines to pairs. Not one to do things halfway, Yuko contacted their coach, the legendary Russian skater Tamara Moskvina, asking that she become her coach so she could be like her idol. Eventually, Moskvina relented, pairing her with Russian skater Alexander Markuntsov. Yuko moved halfway around the world to train in Hackensack, New Jersey. Despite being the first Japanese pair to medal at an ISU (International Skating Union) championship, rules dictate that to compete for the nation you represent at the Olympics, you must be a citizen. When Markuntsov was unable to secure a Japanese passport, the partnership dissolved.

Not one to give up on her career, and with changes in pairs partnerships not uncommon, Yuko was matched with two different American partners and even relocated to St. Petersburg to continue training with Moskvina, even though she didn’t speak a word of Russian. Again, not one to do things halfway, Yuko enrolled at the State University of St. Petersburg and graduated with a degree in International Relations, learning Russian along the way. She now speaks it fluently. Although these initial partnerships did not work out, in the spring of 2006, Yuko was paired by Nikolai Velikov with the strapping Alexander “Sasha” Smirnov and, after initially training with him, they both chose to go with Moskvina. This match turned out serendipitously, as they captured three consecutive Russian national titles, two world championship bronze medals and the European championship in 2010.

During this time, Yuko faced a difficult decision. As the top-ranked Russian team, they were expected to compete at the next Olympics. As Smirnov would be unable to obtain Japanese citizenship, if she wanted to compete at the Olympics, Yuko had to acquire Russian citizenship instead. As Japan does not allow dual citizenships, she had to give up her original passport, leading to the name change that resulted from the transliteration from Kanji to Cyrillic. She cannot get her passport back until at least 2018, and requires a Japanese visa just to visit her parents there. Some media outlets viciously labeled her a “traitor skater”, but this was in 2008, and by then she was already collecting several medals on the ISU Grand Prix circuit (it’s the world cup season in figure skating) and the pair's sheer excellence managed to silence some critics. To this day, Yuko has a following in her native Japan and is greeted with warm, appreciative applause whenever she steps onto the ice in competitions there.

The duo faced disappointment at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Despite being one of the favourites to medal, they made several mistakes in their free skate and finished off the podium. While a fourth-place finish is an impressive debut in the Olympics, the fact that this was the first time in 50 years that Russia did not even place on the podium was, over there, considered the equivalent of the Chicago Bulls not winning the NBA championship in the 1990s over here. Or for a more local example, that’s like the Oilers not winning the Stanley Cup every year like they did in the 1980s. In Russia, figure skating is considered a fine art as well as a sport and is supremely respected: in other words, I am not speaking out of hyperbole. Undeterred, and despite intense media scrutiny from both the Japanese and Russian press, the pair soldiered on, and are still competing at the highest level in the sport.

O, Canada! Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir

O, Canada!

Wherever you are in the world, you might think that the recent very ugly Stanley Cup Finals were representative of my hometown of Vancouver and of Canada in general.

Wipe that condescension and disdain off your face. Have you forgotten that just a year and a half ago, you were fawning over how absolutely glorious our Olympics where? They also took place in Vancouver, you know.

On this Canada Day, I have chosen to honour one of my favourite moments of the 2010 Olympics: the free dance of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian Olympic ice dance champions.

Because everyone loves a back story, especially for the Olympics, here it is. Tessa and Scott have been skating together since childhood. They were world junior champions in ice dance and debuted spectacularly at the senior level by finishing sixth at the worlds in 2007. They then made the leap to second in 2008, and complimented their silver medal with a bronze the following year. They were one of the contenders for the 2010 Olympics, having won numerous pre-Olympic meets in the 2009/2010 season. They faced stiff competition from their American training partners Meryl Davis & Charlie White, their teammates Tanith Belbin & Benjamin Agosto, and the Russian world champions Oksana Domnina & Maxim Shabalin. This does not include the French, British and Italian couples nipping at their heels.

In the preliminary compulsory dance

By the time of the final free dance, the Canadian Olympic team had collectively taken a bit of a beating. The ambitious “Own the Podium” program was designed with the goal of putting Canada atop the medal rankings with the most medals. It was the midway point of an Olympics darkened by the death of a Georgian luger on the day of the opening ceremony, a lack of snow in what became a record warm winter for the city of Vancouver, and a respectable but unspectacular medal tally for the Canadian team at that point. A rather nasty British journalist sensationally wrote that these Olympics were about to become “the worst ever”, and we were just barely halfway. This was Monday, February 22, 2010.

Then Tessa and Scott took the ice.

Somewhat unexpectedly the leaders going into the free dance, Virtue & Moir were predicted to win a medal, but a lot of prognosticators had forecast silver or bronze for the team, behind the Americans and / or Russians. The country was hungry for a moment to really shine and gain momentum.

What happened next was sheer magic. The clip is below.