Be it her films or her music, Soko struggles to keep her manic energy in check
It was an unusually demanding film script, physically. The first half called for its female lead to keep her right eye closed steadily, a feat that could only be accomplished by gluing her eyelashes together. The second half required her to open both eyes, but clench her left hand into a twisted claw, then writhe through paralytic spasms on the floor of a Belle Époque Parisian psychiatric hospital, while rarely speaking any lines of dialogue. So, what on Earth about Alice Winocour’s new docudrama Augustine proved alluring to French actress/chanteuse Soko, who auditioned with more than 800 other contenders for the role of the titular maid who becomes a patient of famed neurologist Dr. Charcot (Vincent Lindon)?
“All of it!” she giddily exclaims. “And everything that is going to make me not look like me, to where I can’t even recognize myself when I look in the mirror? That’s what I wanted! For me, it was the most exciting thing.”
Soko—née one Bordeaux-born Stéphanie Sokolinski, who also just issued her lo-fi, Leonard-Cohen-cryptic, English-language debut, I Thought I Was An Alien (Community Music)—delighted in the method-acting process. As Augustine—first diagnosed with the then-popular women’s condition of “hysteria”—is gradually cured of her seizures through Charcot’s Victorian-era hypnosis, her portrayer felt equally transformed.
“Every day I had an hour of makeup, just to glue my eyelashes, and it was definitely super-weird,” she says. “And it gave me a whole new perspective through the character, because suddenly you have to look at the world a different way. You can’t see half of it, so I thought, ‘This is how she must have felt.’ But after the film?” She sighs. “You’re totally fucked, and you go into therapy and start taking pills just to feel better.”
Soko isn’t kidding. Even though she’s a silver-screen vet overseas, with more than a dozen movies to her credit (such as Didier Bourdon’s Madame Irma and Xavier Giannoli’s À l’origine, which earned her a 2010 César nomination for most promising actress), she doesn’t consider herself much of a thespian.
“But I can’t do anything halfway—I’m always 1,000 percent into things, fully involved in everything I choose to do,” says Soko. So, when Augustine repeatedly slapped or punched herself during filming, Soko came home bruised, as well, then fell into the rhythm of the abusive behavior. “I would punch myself in the face, like really hard,” she says. “And that kind of stayed with me afterwards—I was on tour at the time, and I would, out of the blue, just hit myself a lot. Augustine carried with me, and I just felt super-suicidal.”
On tour at the time, Soko began cancelling show after show. Eventually, she couldn’t leave her house, and just waking up each morning proved to be a Herculean task. Her brother finally insisted that she see a therapist and be prescribed some sort of medication.
“So, they gave me mild anti-anxiety pills, and after 10 days I felt better,” she says. “And I wouldn’t hit my face on the wall anymore and do other crazy things I’d been doing. But I’m already very hyperactive—I have crazy ADD, and I’m always touching something with my hands. I just have weird gestures, I guess; I have issues. I’m in the studio right now, and I’m totally stressed out. I just don’t want to deal with real life.”
That same irrepressible, kinetic energy—which, granted, makes her appear rather daffy at times—is also Soko’s greatest strength. She’s temporarily residing in Los Angeles, where she’s not only in the studio, but ready to leave it, with a completed sophomore album titled My Dreams Dictate My Reality.
“Because to me, reality is terrifying,” she says. “All I want to do during my day is write music and create things. And making music is more what I do now, and I’m very happy doing it, and I feel independent, and it brings me a lot of satisfaction to be able to it on my own. But everything that’s real life? Like booking plane tickets or booking shows, or making sure that your band is available? I’m just like, ‘No! I don’t want to know about it! I just want to write!’”
In actuality, Alien is more than a year old; it came out in 2012 overseas. And it’s difficult to gauge what lyrical part(s) Soko will be playing on the upcoming Dreams. But her first official release is a whimsical, often funereal wonder. You can almost picture it being sung by a spasmodic, straitjacketed Augustine in some places, like carpe-diem dirge “We Might Be Dead By Tomorrow,” gentle acoustic-plucked threat “Don’t You Touch Me” and beatbox-metallic processional “Destruction Of The Disgusting Ugly Hate,” with its eerie observation “Scars on my heart can’t you see/What have you done to me/Scars on my arms can’t you see/Where I am sinking.” The album closes with “Why Don’t You Eat Me Now You Can,” on which her charming, peace-and-love rasp chirps to some wayward lover, “Take a picture of me in your head when I’m dead/’Cause you won’t forget about me/I will scream in your dreams.” Nice way to end a relationship. But that’s part of Soko’s attraction, too; she’s Addams Family-creepy, and quite happily so.
It started a long time ago, the 27-year-old reckons. Her father died when she was only five, and family life just went downhill from there. “I was going through so much darkness throughout my childhood,” she says. “First, I was having crazy nightmares when I was a kid. You know the whole thing about indigo children? It’s the wave of kids that were born in the ’80s that were really connected with higher powers somehow and had dreams come true and visions. When I was young, each time I was having nightmares, someone would die, so I thought that I was a witch and I was killing people. That made me go through a lot of therapy—I really thought that I was evil.”
The aspiring actress left home at 16 to study her craft in exotic Paris. “And I was learning life from then on, until I felt like everything that happened before I was 16 never happened—it felt like another life, like I was born at 16,” she says. She began composing, exorcising her demons in song, until she logged her first hit single in 2007, in Denmark, of all places, a little ditty dubbed “I’ll Kill Her.” By 2009, she’d announced via MySpace that her musical career was finished and that she herself was “dead.” A few months later, she resurrected herself with a new single, “I’m So Ready To Be A Good Man.” “I’d just moved to L.A. then, and I’d wanted to change my life,” she says. “But I was just overwhelmed, and I don’t think I had the right people around me—they weren’t very supportive.”
Now, Soko finds catharsis, even some self-help, through songwriting. “Death is probably the main thing that I write about—fearing it, or wanting to live my life as fast as I can because I’m petrified,” she says. “Every time I go to bed, I wonder if I’m ever going to wake up, because my dad actually died in bed. So, music has helped a lot. I want to do alchemy with music. I want to turn every dark thing that happened in my life into something creative.”
And the bubbly brunette understands one ADD irony—if she had been alive back in Augustine’s time, she would have been instantly misdiagnosed with hysteria and locked up, as well. “And I find that pretty funny,” she says. “I would have been right there in the asylum with her!”
—Tom Lanham
