Monsieur Aznavour

Grand Corps Malade — the slam poet Fabien Marsaud — and Mehdi Idir had made two features together, including the well-liked La Vie scolaire, when Charles Aznavour approached them about filming his life. He died in 2018 before production began; the film arrived in 2024 and drew more than a million admissions in France.

Tahar Rahim plays Aznavour from his twenties into old age, with the prosthetics and the vocal work that role demands, and sings a substantial part of the material himself. The film runs chronologically from the Paris of Armenian refugees in the 1930s through the years of being told he was too short, too nasal and too foreign, to Édith Piaf — played by Marie-Julie Baup — taking him on tour, and then to the decades of success. Bastien Bouillon plays Pierre Roche, his early writing partner.

It is a conventional biopic and does not pretend otherwise; the critical reception in France was warm rather than excited, and there is almost no English-language critical record. What carries it is Rahim, who is one of the best actors in Europe, and the songs. Watch it for the performance and the catalogue, not for formal surprises.