Hardy’s press tours brought her to many faraway locales, from Tehran to Johannesburg to New York City, where she once perched atop a Formula 1-themed float during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. On her second trip to Brazil, during the pivotal year of 1968she befriended her assigned hostess and interpreter, a woman named Lena. Like many others, Hardy had been enchanted by Brazilian music and especially bossa nova, a languid, sensual offshoot of samba. Her 1968 album, known as Comment te dire adieu, features a cover of “Sabiá” (as “La Mésange”) by Antonio Carlos Jobim, considered the father of bossa nova. The interest was reciprocated: That same year, the Brazilian tropicália group Os Mutantes included a rendition of “The first happiness of the day,” previously recorded by Hardy, on their debut album.
In October 1970, after traveling to Rio for a third time to sit on the jury of the International Song FestivalHardy decided to make an album inspired by elements of Brazilian music, later calling it “one of my best souvenirs.” Lena had introduced Hardy to another Brazilian woman in Paris, the guitarist, songwriter, and producer known as Tuca. The pair put their own spin on bossa nova on 1971’s Françoise Hardy, unofficially known as La question. Midway through, Hardy references “saudade,” a Portuguese word meant to express melancholic longing. An important theme in bossa nova music with no English equivalent, saudade is a romantic nostalgia for something or someone that will never return, or perhaps never existed. The Portuguese writer Francisco Manuel de Mello described it as “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy.” Hardy and Tuca could both relate.
Tuca’s situation was strictly unrequited: She was infatuated with Lea Massari, an Italian actress who was not a lesbian. For her part, Hardy had been engaged in an “impossible love affair” with the singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc since the late 1960s. In her memoir, The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles, Hardy describes her early labelmate and occasional collaborator as an “uncommonly charismatic” man with a “reflexive need to flee from any form of commitment.” Hardy, who had struggled with her self-worth since childhood, was frustrated by Dutronc’s flighty behavior and flirtations with other women. After innumerable broken dates and lonely nights, it’s no wonder that the credits of La question list one “Pinocchio” as “Catalyseur.”
On the forlorn title track, Hardy is distraught by the distance between herself and an unapproachable lover; attempting to understand him is like “chasing the wind.” And yet something, perhaps the meaning of love itself, implores her to continue to try: “Tu es ma question sans réponse, mon cri muet et mon silence” (“You are my question without an answer, my mute cry and my silence”). Nearly a decade earlier, on “Tous les garçons et les filles,” Hardy wondered when she would experience the bliss of feeling loved. The woman who made La question knows the when and the how, but not the why.
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