THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – MUST SEE
You have to be as old as rock ‘n’ roll to have known a world without Sparks. A half-century of career, 25 studio albums (the last being the soundtrack ofAnnette, by Leos Carax) under their name, another with Franz Ferdinand (FFS), successes, lean years, but never separation: Ron and Russell, the sons of Meyer and Miriam Mael, are one of the rare fixed points of the rock landscape. It is not, by far, their only distinctive sign. Unlike their fellow rock stars, no legend surrounds the Sparks, nothing but a thick mystery. Disagreements in interviews when it comes to talking about boutique, they jealously conceal the rest of their existence.
British filmmaker established in Hollywood (thus rising from Shaun of the Dead To Baby Driver), Edgar Wright took on the task of tearing the veil. He obtained the consent of the Mael brothers who intervene extensively, gathered all the archives possible and interviewed collaborators and fans.
His encyclopedic work will delight fans and the curious. It will also allow the Sparks to laugh the last: one hundred and forty minutes after the first black and white images, the mystery of this indissoluble union between two brothers, of this shared childhood which gave birth to a musical universe, remains intact.
What we discover in the course of these sequences, taken both from the attic of the Mael family (the metamorphosis of boys grown up under Eisenhower into children of the 1960s) and from France 3 Normandie (a version of When I’m With You, 1980, which was a hit in France and not elsewhere), it is an iron will, that which allowed the group to last so long without ever compromising itself, whose impetus remains difficult to discern. Is it the fierce desire for originality of Ron Mael, who made a brush mustache at a time when musicians took themselves very seriously? (Discovering the video of This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us, in 1974, John Lennon called Ringo Starr: “Turn on your TV, there’s Marc Bolan singing with Hitler on keyboards!” “) Is this the requirement of the two brothers who hold their audience in high enough esteem to suppose them capable of unprecedented experiences? We cannot know, because the distribution of roles remains mysterious: Ron and Russell express themselves in the first person plural, but we will know nothing of the division of labor between them, of its evolution over the decades.
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