General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Same Old Song

Same Old Song (On connaît la chanson) is a 1997 French musical comedy directed by Alain Resnais in which six Parisians cross paths over real estate, romance, and class differences while periodically lip-synching snippets of pre-recorded French pop songs. Written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, who also play leading roles, it was dedicated to the British screenwriter Dennis Potter and became the biggest hit of Resnais' career in France.¹^•²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Original title	On connaît la chanson (France, 1997), 120 minutes; French release 12 November 1997¹^•⁴
Director / writers	Alain Resnais; screenplay and dialogue by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri²
Musical device	Actors lip-synch 36 snippets of pre-recorded French pop songs, about a third of them pre-1940⁵
Main cast	Pierre Arditi (Claude), Sabine Azéma (Odile), Jean-Pierre Bacri (Nicolas), André Dussollier (Simon), Agnès Jaoui (Camille), Lambert Wilson (Marc), Jane Birkin (Jane)²
Awards	Silver Bear and seven Césars, including best film, three acting awards, screenplay, editing, and sound⁶^•⁷
Box office	Estimated budget €7,900,000; gross in the United States $32.4K¹
Reception	71% Tomatometer (17 reviews) and 81% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes; 7.3/10 on IMDb⁸^•¹

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The film follows half a dozen Parisians who repeatedly cross paths as they move through the city. Claude (Pierre Arditi) is married to the frustrated Odile (Sabine Azéma), who wants a new apartment. Her former lover Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Bacri) is also looking to move and turns to the real estate agent Simon (André Dussollier) for help. Simon has a crush on Camille (Agnès Jaoui), Odile's sister, who is dating Simon's boss, Marc (Lambert Wilson).⁸

Jonathan Rosenbaum, the American film critic long associated with the Chicago Reader, described the film as a comedy about real estate and class differences that captures Paris in the 1990s, periodically revealing Resnais' surrealist roots.³ The characters include an unhappy salesman who writes radio plays on the side, a tourist guide, and a ruthless property developer.⁹ Camille, the tour guide, is writing a history thesis on "The yeoman of the year 1000 at Paladu Lake," a running joke in which no one appreciates how interesting yeomen are, and the film traces her bout with panic attacks and depression alongside a romance with the handsome sleaze Marc.¹⁰

The lip-sync device

The film is dedicated to the memory of Dennis Potter, the British screenwriter whose television musicals Pennies from Heaven (1978) and The Singing Detective (1986) pioneered the device of characters bursting into lip-synched song to express feelings they cannot voice in ordinary conversation.⁹^•¹ Resnais applies the device to several generations of popular French song: the actors lip-synch 36 snippets of pre-recorded French pop music, of which about a third are pre-1940 recordings by performers such as Arletty, Josephine Baker, Dranem, Henri Garat, Gaston Ouvrard, and Édith Piaf.⁵

The treatment differs from Potter's. The interludes last no more than seconds, the songs are not staged as fantasy productions, and no one on screen notices that anyone is singing; the lip-synched dialogue works like recitative in opera.¹⁰ The songs serve as cross-references to the characters' moods and are not always bound by gender; in one example, a Nazi commander during the Occupation receives Hitler's order to destroy Paris, and then the voice of Josephine Baker singing "Two Loves Have I" comes out of his mouth.³^•¹¹ In another moment, Jane Birkin, in a cameo, "sings" a snatch of one of her own songs.⁹ André Dussollier's character sings "Vertige de l'amour" with the voice of Alain Bashung while playing a Republican Guard horseman.²

Production

Resnais had previously worked with the writing-acting couple Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, who scripted his two preceding features and costarred in Un air de famille; they wrote the screenplay and dialogue here and took the roles of Camille and Nicolas.³^•² The crew included the cinematographer Renato Berta, editor Hervé de Luze, composer Bruno Fontaine, and production designer Jacques Saulnier, with Bruno Pésery producing and AMLF distributing.² Shooting ran from 13 January to 9 March 1997.¹² The film was a co-production among French, Swiss, British, and Italian companies, including France 2 Cinéma, Vega Film, Greenpoint Films, Arena Films, and Caméra One.¹^•⁸ The French classification authority issued its visa on 22 October 1997 with a 123-minute duration, and the film opened in French theaters on 12 November 1997.⁴^•¹

Reception and awards

In France the film was Resnais' biggest commercial hit, and it "truly cleaned up" at the César Awards, winning best picture, three best-acting awards, and honors for best screenplay, editing, and sound, with additional nominations for Resnais and four others; it also received a Silver Bear.³^•⁶^•⁷

Critical opinion divided along lines of musical familiarity. Rosenbaum called it fun, different, and at times mysterious, while noting it is less popular among viewers unfamiliar with the music.³ The Los Angeles Times called it a sure-fire charmer even though the songs are by and large unfamiliar to non-French audiences.¹¹ The San Francisco Chronicle found it light but amusing, arguing that aside from perhaps Édith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier the singers would be unrecognizable to most Americans, and that at 120 minutes it should have been 100 at most.¹⁰ Time Out criticized the characters as too banal for their romantic longings to matter, weakening Resnais' point that clichéd passions simmer beneath the blandest exteriors.⁹ The critic David Sterritt, writing for Turner Classic Movies in 2008, judged it an instant crowd-pleaser but well below the level of Resnais' greatest work.⁶ Aggregated scores sit in the moderately positive range: 71% among 17 critics and 81% among audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and 7.3/10 from about 4,700 IMDb users.⁸^•¹

Place in Resnais' career

Resnais, whose earlier landmarks include Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), had grown lighter in tone over the four decades after those works, and Same Old Song sits close in spirit to Jacques Demy's sung-through The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.¹¹ In scholarship on music in contemporary French cinema, the film is treated as a special case of the musical: the sounds emerging from the actors' mouths are in principle non-diegetic, since the characters are not singing within the story world, yet the songs are woven into spoken dialogue rather than staged as numbers.⁵ Resnais returned to a real-estate theme later in Private Fears in Public Places, and the film's use of pre-existing songs was cited as a precedent by later French film composers discussing their own work.⁶^•¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1990s and 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?