Early 1960, Dalida, already a music hall star, yields to the siren song of the cinema. Major problem, she only turns in pochades and films series B for can and Z for zero.
“The Unknown from Hong Kong”, a 1963 feature film, is no exception to the rule, a critic will write : “the screenplay is awful, written on a bistro table and the direction of Jacques Poitrenaud is soft as a marshmallow. There remains the song from the film, “rue de mon Paris” and this unlikely duo: Serge Gainsbourg and Dalida.
In “The Unknown from Hong Kong” in 1963, Dalida plays a cabaret singer. As for Gainsbourg, he is not yet the huge star he will become. The director has not sprained himself, Serge Gainsbourg plays more or less what he really is in life, composer and bar pianist always with a glass of whiskey on the piano.
“Rue de mon Paris” pays homage to the poets who have magnified the capital so well, Francis Carco, Apollinaire, Prévert and Verlaine. It is logical to find Serge Gainsbourg in the lineage.
“Rue de mon Paris”, an air of Java signed Francis Lopez, the king of operetta, is a real novelty that does not exist in the discography of Dalida, nor in that of Gainsbourg, only recorded for film purposes in black and white “the unknown from Hong-Kong” but that this song is pretty even in a slightly gray sky, Dalida, Gainsbourg, a duet to idealize Paris.