My Way

Cloclo (2012) — released internationally as My Way — is a French-Belgian biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Florent-Emilio Siri. Jérémie Renier plays Claude François, the pop star who dominated French radio and television through the 1960s and 1970s, and who co-wrote the melody that Paul Anka turned into "My Way."

The film spans his entire arc: a strict upbringing in Egypt, the leap to Paris, the relentless touring, and the obsessive professionalism that made him a superstar and drove away nearly everyone close to him. François ran his career like a military operation — choreography rehearsed to the minute, stage productions built to spectacle scale. Off stage the discipline curdled into control, and the people who couldn't live inside his rules kept leaving.

What Siri gets right is the texture of that kind of ambition: how it produces something extraordinary and hollows out everything else. The film doesn't soften the contradictions, and Renier's performance carries both the performer's magnetism and the private wreckage underneath it. François died alone in his Paris apartment in the early hours of March 1978, thirty-nine years old. By that point in the film, it feels inevitable. Stream My Way / Cloclo (2012) online on iFILM.