Hardy fare: Falling for Françoise

There's a scene in a now-forgotten Hungarian movie called Time Stands Still where a group of '50s teenagers stand solemnly around a dingy, smoke-choked room chanting an indecipherable something in a slurred, mumbling rhythm. Your ears will need a minute or two to sort out this strange incantation as "Don't Be Cruel." It's clear that none of the characters has any idea what their blessed mantra means; it's equally clear that it couldn't mean any more to them if they did.

Pop music is many things -- a mood, an attitude. Most of all, it's a sound. That's why the question asked of millions of kids by millions of adults -- "How can you enjoy it if you can't understand the words?" -- misses the point. (Imagine asking the same thing of an opera devotee.) As critic Simon Frith once observed, in pop, music doesn't exist to give lyrics meaning, lyrics exist to give music meaning.

Which is to say that though I'd like it if I understood the words in the songs of the French pop singer Françoise Hardy, I couldn't love her music any more if I did. For me, discovering Hardy has been an incomparable lesson in the false barriers that -- in pop music at least -- language creates. A star in France since her first single, "Tous les garçons et les filles," in 1962, Hardy has never cracked the American charts, though she possesses one of pop's great romantic voices. I've been listening to her endlessly since last spring, when I saw a 1962 promotional film for "Tous les garçons" on MTV. I think now I understand how astronomers feel when they happen upon a celestial body that they realize should be exactly where it is. In a few months, Hardy's songs have taken on the familiarity of music that I've lived with for years.

When she first appeared, at age 18, still a student at the Sorbonne, Françoise Hardy looked like lots of women you might see on campuses or in folk clubs: long, straight, chestnut hair; suede jackets; jeans; boots. Often she was photographed strumming an acoustic guitar. That look, and the fact that she wrote her own lyrics, has sometimes led her to be counted a precursor to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell. Except that there's no self-indulgence, no preciousness to her music. At heart, Hardy is a pop star. She recorded her share of folkish ballads ("Mon amie la rose" is probably the most famous), but she wasn't too pure to deny the pleasures of yé-yé (the moniker the French gave rock and roll), to record a French version of Burt Bacharach's "A Girl like You" (originally recorded by Dionne Warwick), or to lift a chorus from the Righteous Brothers' "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration" for the great "Non, c'est ne pas un rêve." She couldn't have been more different, though, from the other French pop idols of the time, glitzy Americanized knockoffs like Johnny Hollyday or pout-and-pose queen Sylvie Vartan. Hardy's sound was as unfussy as her presentation.

Almost all the first five years of her work for the French label Vogue has been collected on the wonderful four-disc set Françoise Hardy: L'intégrale disques Vogue 1962/67. On almost every one of the 83 tracks, Hardy's voice is mixed right up front. She was lucky enough to work with superb musicians and arrangers who didn't try to overwhelm her. The subtlety and sensitivity of the backing emerges gradually: the gently swaying carousel rhythms of "Tous les garçons"; the alternation between simple acoustic strumming and an electric guitar picking out singular notes, like glittering shafts of light, on "C'est à l'amour auquel je pense"; the jazzy little organ lines on "Bien longtemps"; the guitar on "Ce petit coeur," which sounds like what would have resulted if Roger McGuinn tried to imitate a harpsichord.

Yet it's Hardy's voice -- a sweet, clear, lyrical alto -- that creates the moods and meanings of these songs. There were dozens of sensitive, poetic young things on the charts in the '60s (and there are now, for that matter). Unlike most of them, she never sounds coy or coquettish. There's a playful quality on numbers like "Ça a raté" or "Oh oh cheri" where she might be trying on her rock-and-roll shoes. Hardy sings softly most of the time (without going breathy), though her voice is surprisingly sturdy. She's equal to the drama of "Je veux qu'il revienne" or "Pourtant tu m'aimes," which suggests the Shangri-Las' teen melodramas without ever forcing a moment.

The appeal of her '60s music has much to do with the poignancy of youth, but she never sounds falsely innocent. She faces romantic disappointment head on (as she does in her ultra-cool appearance as a racecar driver's girlfriend in the 1966 film Grand Prix). Her heartbreak is never lugubrious or lachrymose or begging our protection. On "All Over the World" (included here in both French and English versions), Hardy creates a melancholy enchantment, an urban night of solitary lovers wandering the city as if they were trying to follow a song beaming down from a star.

Hardy's '60s music holds a special meaning for those of us who hear her as a voice from a charmed era, when the beauty and courage of young people could be described in terms as varied and heartrending as Jacques Demy's 1964 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Jean-Luc Godard's '66 Masculin-féminine (the latter will be at the Brattle Theatre next Thursday). But she hasn't been trapped by that era. She's recorded consistently since her debut. On her latest CD, last year's Le danger (Virgin France), Hardy (who's now 53 and still stunningly beautiful) sings as sweetly as ever, but she conveys a mature experience. And just as she escaped coyness in the '60s, she now escapes sounding jaded. With its washes of slightly distorted guitars, Le danger is an utterly convincing rock record -- not the sound of someone trying desperately to prove she's contemporary. Hardy nails a contemporary sound effortlessly on track after track.

If you listen to pop music long enough, it seems to carry on a conversation in your head. Listening to Hardy, I hear the Bee Gees singing, "It's only words," and the Beatles asking, "Why should I feel the way I do?" Words are only a small part of what Hardy uses to steal our hearts away. Every time I hear her, I know exactly why she makes me feel the way I do.

Françoise Hardy's CDs can be found in the international sections of Tower and HMV. However the best selection I've come across, including the box set, is at Manhattan's Other Music, a treasure chest of a store that does mail orders. It's at 15 East Fourth Street, New York, New York 10003; call (212) 477-8150.

-- Charles Taylor