Aznavour by Charles

I saw this film I'd been postponing, not realising what I was in for. As if doubting the deific Charles Aznavour - the way we'd discover he never doubted himself, despite the merciless mirror of his self-reflection.

It is hard to describe the flow of thoughts and emotions that came with this screening.

I found myself enthralled in the world of another like never before. Magic - a great artist succeeded to captivate me as if he'd been abundantly alive - to captivate both my emotions (I'm tearful as soon as I hear him sing) and the intellect.

(I would have jumped on the wrong train afterwards, if someone didn't ask me whether it went to the "Paradise mall" which I knew was on the other side of town.)

The film leads us along and into the world of Charles Aznavour through his lens (home movies and photographs), following the narration of his diary (I have to look for a book by him, since the rich reflections are literature of the highest caliber). All the while, Aznavour contemplates the places and people of his worldly existence, while questioning it: "I wanted to jump on Catherine Deneuve's shoulders, like a tiger, and to scream in order to be seen... And yet I exist... I am depicted, therefore I must exist."

Aznavour navigates his doubts with astute self-observation, never turning them into insecurities, while identifying with none other but the wonder-ful gaze of a child.

When there isn't a child in the picture, he feels the menacing, lifeless wall of the crowd, until a child could be at least imagined.

As to the gaze of an adult... "What happened between our eyes shook me to the core". "We saw the world as a continuous space we roamed, only lead by love".

"My eyes and your eyes, and what takes place in between", until there are no more barriers, no distance."

There's the merciless self-reflection I mention: "I know what I had working against me: my voice, my appearance, my background..."; "I was aware of my gestures, hollow, dry, and clumsy..." - it's amazing to hear him make these assessments, given we know him by his most compelling voice and his grace... the finesse that permeated the space when I saw him a year before his passing, when he had hardly aged.

There's the ambition: "One day I'll see my name on Carnegie Hall", even as he was living in poverty; there's also the detachment, which he doesn't let turn into alienation - something that could've easily happened while he "lived a life through the gaze of the audience". It's this need to enthrall the audience along on his personal journey, while granting the world his curiosity; an acute sense of individuation while being one with the world, insofar as "the childhood's home is the childhood".

It's a sense almost mythical, impossible to describe, as I am reluctant to describe Aznavour's presence through this film. His words sketching his beloved at the height of their romance: "She was my white mirror, giving me a sense of calm, unmoved like a snow mountain amid the desert"...

That desert in a sense was him - not as in an absence, but the presence of his "roots of the East", the voices of his ancestors, the eternal comfort of his grandmother he was finally able to meet and embrace in Armenia - the homeland neither of his parents had known.