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 System 1-themed float in the course of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On her second journey to Brazil, in the course of 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, encompasses a cowl of “Sabiá” (as “La Mésange”) by Antonio Carlos Jobim, thought of 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 take a seat on the jury of the Competition Internacional da Canção, Hardy determined to make an album impressed by parts of Brazilian music, later calling it “one in every of my finest souvenirs.” Lena had launched Hardy to a different Brazilian girl 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 may 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 get pleasure from.” Hardy and Tuca may each relate.
Tuca’s state of affairs 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 “unattainable love affair” with the singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc for the reason that late 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 have to flee from any type of dedication.” Hardy, who had struggled along with her self-worth since childhood, was annoyed by Dutronc’s flighty habits and flirtations with different girls. After innumerable damaged dates and lonely nights, it’s no marvel that the credit of La query record one “Pinocchio” as “Catalyseur.”
On the forlorn title monitor, Hardy is distraught by the space between herself and an unapproachable lover; trying to grasp him is like “chasing the wind.” And but one thing, maybe the which means of affection itself, implores her to proceed to strive: “Tu es ma query sans réponse, mon cri muet et mon silence” (“You might be 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 lady who made La query is aware of the when and the how, however not the why.