ESC Munich 1983 — “Si la vie est cadeau”

Eurovision 1983

full show

Date: 23 April 1983
Venue: Rudi-Sedlmayer-Halle, Munich
Winning country: Luxembourg (5^th win)
Winning entry: Corinne Hermès, “Si la vie est cadeau”

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Unless you are reading this in the distant wastelands of the 23^rd century (in which case hello, distant traveller, and I hope my blogs translate well into Chinese or Hindi), English is currently the lingua franca of the world. But you don’t have to look too far back for a time when French dominated geopolitics and diplomacy: for the first few decades of their existence, it was the official language of the United Nations, of NATO, of countless other important international organisations. If you wanted to be taken seriously, it seemed like you needed to speak the Language of Officialdom — and that language was unquestionably Gallic.

The Eurovision Song Contest was no exception to this rule: up till the late 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon to hear the presenters babbling away for minutes in French while completely ignoring the English speakers; meanwhile, Francophone songs consistently placed high in contest after contest, winning five of the first seven editions and many more afterwards. As I’ve expressed ad nauseam, however, this latter proliferation of wins was not necessarily correlated to quality: many of these French entries were dull, rambling, and self-important; they would occasionally find the right balance, but revert to form soon after.

The exception, by and large, was Luxembourg. Francophone dominance in the early years of Eurovision was a two-pillared thing: while France hoovered up most of the acclaim with their highfaluting ballads, Luxembourg innovated on the sidelines, putting out hit after audience-pleasing hit. (Monaco, meanwhile, was content to take on what both had soundly rejected and become a French proxy.) The result was continually rewarding for the French language: when the language rule was briefly abolished in the mid-70s, Francophone songs still managed to hold their own, and remain popular with the juries. It’s just such a shame that Luxembourg chose to end their excellent track record, and this era of French dominance, with an overwrought howler.

Corinne Hermès, Luxembourg’s representative at the 1983 Eurovision Song Contest, is French. This is nothing surprising: many of the country’s previous representatives hadn’t been Luxembourgish natives, and in fact three of their four previous winners had also come from France. (The fourth was a Greek national, who’d mostly been living in Hamburg.) But over the course of “Si la vie est cadeau”, it becomes obvious that Hermès is also singing a French song — to be precise, she is singing a song that could only have come from France.

SO MUCH of this entry oozes Frenchness. The lyrics, like most ESC chansons, are incomprehensibly vague: there’s some mention of a transparent ocean, which somehow connects to how “life is a gift”, which in turn transforms into a lament about how the singer is missing “the child I wanted to give you in the spring” (what even is this bullshit?). The performance is unimaginably static: Hermès stands rooted to her spot onstage while staring into the camera, but not in the rousing way perfected by another previous French winner singing for Luxembourg; instead she looks haunted, possessed, dead between the eyes. She starts bellowing about 45 seconds in, and then basically doesn’t stop bellowing for the rest of the song; while she does this, her face contorts into different positions, yet not once does she convey a second emotion other than anguish. One might expect all of this from France (and one would not be wrong in doing so for that year either), but from Luxembourg? Absolute betrayal.

Luxembourg apes their neighbour so much, in fact, that even the latter’s recent improvements can be spotted in “Si la vie est cadeau”. Despite an unwavering commitment to exhausting their audiences’ patience in the first two decades of the Contest, France underwent something of a renaissance starting with 1976’s “Un, deux, trois”: turning away from their particularly desiccated variation of the chanson, they instead began experimenting with new styles and elements. And the thing was, they were rather good at it: things like electric guitar or fancy camera angles, already commonplace in other countries’ entries, actually looked and sounded quite nice in the hands of the French.

Unfortunately, the Francophones weren’t completely able to let go of an old tradition, which is where this particular entry comes in. Although “Si la vie est cadeau” is at its heart just another chanson, the songwriters (both French, bien sur) have tried to modernise by adding new elements. The only problem is, they do it without any conviction: compare France’s 1980 entry, where electric guitar played a central role in the song, with the perfunctory picking of the bass found in Hermès’ song, and it’s clear that the instrument’s presence in the latter is really just for ornamentation. The heavy reliance on piano and sudden vocal swoops wouldn’t sound out of place on an Air Supply album (or indeed one by our next Francophone winner), but that just strands the song squarely in 1983 with obvious gestures towards the past.

Or take the fancy camera angles: the French had, during the past few years, developed ways of framing singers that weren’t just them staring awkwardly at the audience or the camera. But although “Si la vie est cadeau” does try to shoot its singer from different angles, their one big idea is to inexplicably zoom in through the harp down in the pit; the result is an unnecessarily slanted view of a Corrine Hermès dwarfed by the instruments of the orchestra. You’d think they’d have other shots of her as well, but nope: the rest is just standard portrait shots of Hermès showing off her undeniably powerful pipes, or occasionally of Hermès showing off her undeniably powerful pipes while accompanied by some garishly-dressed backing singers.

The upshot of all this is that Luxembourg has somehow managed to become less innovative than the French, which meant they’d basically lost the one edge they had over their neighbour. The two countries, along with the occasional effort from Monaco, had once offered a multi-faceted view of Francophone music: in one year of the contest, you might find songs in French that were temperamental, or sentimental, or just pure mental. Yet the Monegasque broadcaster had quietly slunk away from Eurovision in 1980, and now Luxembourg’s had gotten in line behind France, sharing (or acquiescing to?) its idea of what makes a good ESC entry. With little nuance that distinguished between the two, a diverse vision had become a monolith.

With that in mind, it’s hardly a surprise that Luxembourg, too, slowly found themselves getting edged out of the competition as the 80s went on. They managed a couple of top-5 finishes later in the decade, but soon found themselves a frequent visitor to the lower reaches of the scoreboard. It’s tempting to say that some of their songs during that period were unappreciated gems, but honestly they’re all just slightly peppier versions of France — and it seems that the juries much preferred the unadulterated version. (Even the singer of “Ca plane pour moi”, invited to represent the Grand Duchy in 1987, managed to put out a thoroughly insipid rocker that severely tested my patience.) Relegated in 1993 due to a series of bad results, they spent the next three decades sulking in the wilderness, during which the French language — and France itself — only kept up a perfunctory existence in the Contest.

Of course, it would be silly to say that the last Luxembourgish winner singlehandedly caused the decline of Francophone dominance at Eurovision. English was just growing in stature as a common language in Europe, and as the French sphere of influence shrunk across the globe, so too did its status as a cultural force to be reckoned with. But “Si la vie est cadeau” feels like a symptom of that decline: at a time when adapting to changing trends and tastes was paramount to success at the ESC, Luxembourg simply stopped trying to figure it out, and resigned themselves to mere imitation of France.

Luckily, though, this story has something of a happy ending. Last year Luxembourg finally decided to give the ESC another go, and have done quite alright for themselves with two eclectic French-language entries. Meanwhile France, as we shall see in due course, caught a(nother) second wind in the 2010s and are now regularly storming into the top 10 with well-constructed, and I have to say much more heartfelt records. Only time will tell whether the French language will stand tall once again in the Contest — but one hopes that, come what may, it’s not with songs that moan about unborn children.

Rating: 3/10

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Best song

Having won second place last year, Avi Toledano of Israel returned — this time as a songwriter, supporting eventual folk electronica goddess Ofra Haza singing “Chai”. To those who thought last year’s entry was stridently Israeli, “Chai” says “hold my bier”: a defiant assertion of Jewish survival in the land of the Holocaust, this is one of the most euphoric and pointedly political songs ever to grace the Eurovision stage, and everyone involved performs it with a very potent and memorable blend of joie de vivre and existential anguish. Third place also sees the debut of a (Eurovision) legend: Sweden sent the 17-year-old Carola Häggkvist to sing “Främling”, a bouncy bop that constantly emanates an air of mystery; suffice it to say that Carola performs the hell out of it, with that final pose instantly catapulting her into the ESC hall of fame. Four decades on, it’s still a classic.

Winner aside, I actually quite like this year: there’s a whole mix of styles, and although some of the entries have gained notoriety in subsequent years (Turkiye, for example) I found myself enjoying the vast majority. This year’s third-placer Sweden is also my third place; we’ll see Carola again somewhere down the line, but I don’t think she ever surpassed the youthful exuberance that “Främling” offers. My second place, on the other hand, comes completely out of left field: Belgium’s Pas de Deux was jeered at their national selection, as well as ESC rehearsals, for their Devo-esque tune “Rendez-vous”, but I find it absolutely charming and a perfect example of a song that was fully attuned to the pop scene outside Eurovision; you don’t find many songs like it in the Contest, and I am grateful for its existence. But I have to put Israel above it: yes I am very aware that it is basically a “look at us, who’s the big guy now” song, but it’s done so well and Ofra Haza is so impassioned that I can’t help but love it all the same.

PLACE	ACTUAL RESULTS	MY PICKS
1st	Luxembourg, “Si la vie est cadeau”	Israel, “Chai”
2nd	Israel, “Chai”	Belgium, “Rendez-vous“
3rd	Sweden, “Främling“	Sweden, “Främling”

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Next time

As one monolithic monster goes down, another one rises — and this one wears golden shoes.