Review: Gainsbourg
Serge Gainsbourg was a musician whose work became inseparable from his star image. Transforming the French chanson, Gainsbourg’s transgression of generic and moral boundaries produced such infamous classics as ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ (a duet with then wife Jane Birkin, its scandalous lyrics accompanied by Birkin’s orgasmic sighs), ‘Lemon Incest’ (recorded with his 13-year-old daughter Charlotte) and ‘La Marseillaise’ (a reggae cover of the French national anthem). In his later years, however, this constant quest for controversy translated into a sadly comical public persona, the chain-smoking, drunken and often-outrageous Gainsbourg perhaps best encapsulated by this 1986 encounter with Whitney Houston on French television.
Gainsbourg, the first film by French comic book artist Joann Sfar, revels in Gainsbourg’s ubiquitous star image. Despite revising the genre of the biopic by combining animation and puppetry with narrative cinema, Gainsbourg is ultimately a Great Man film of the classical Hollywood ilk – a form which, as Dennis Bingham notes, positions its subject as “a visionary with a pure, one of a kind talent or idea who must overcome opposition to his idea or even just to himself.” As Sfar commented in an interview with Ginette Vincendeau in Sight and Sound, “I do not want to make a ‘realistic’ or ‘journalistic’ film… I take my subject and make him into a legendary hero”. It is perhaps this adherence to the Gainsbourg mythology that renders Gainsbourg an essentially unsatisfying depiction of both the public and private artist.
Gainsbourg does attempt to investigate the origins of Gainsbourg’s provocative nature, examining his Russian-Jewish heritage and his ongoing anxiety over his looks. We meet a young Gainsbourg in Nazi-occupied France, a precocious child artist who is already chain-smoking and attempting to seduce a model many years his senior. He even accepts his yellow star with gusto, quipping with Nazi officers and skipping jauntily out of their offices.
It is here that Gainsbourg’s alter-ego, his “mug”, first emerges. Stepping out of a Nazi propaganda poster, this life-sized puppet is a perverse caricature of the Jew, with cauliflower ears and a hooknose that protrudes like an extra limb. This puppet follows Gainsbourg throughout the remainder of the film, constantly looking over his shoulder like an overbearing superego. While this suggests an anxiety about his Jewish identity, his “mug” also literalises what Sfar sees as a division in Gainsbourg’s personality – between his insecurities over his visage and his womanizing. His “mug” encourages him to give up painting for music – “Drop the art crap. I’ll make you a fortune, pal” – and urges him to seduce the cast of increasingly beautiful and glamorous women who enter his life.
The film charts Gainsbourg’s various relationships – notably his marriages to English actress Jane Birkin and chanson singer Bambou, and his affairs with Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot – for which he is as much remembered as his music. Gainsbourg’s songs have been rearranged and are performed by the film’s actors, which works surprisingly well. The casting is also eerily accurate. Lead Eric Elmosnino so resembles Gainsbourg (especially in the double-denim phase of his later years) that at times you must do a double take, as does Laetitia Casta who plays Brigitte Bardot.
Like this year’s documentary Gainsbourg and His Girls (which screened at ACMI as part of the October retrospective ‘Je t’aime: The Filmic Lives of Gainsbourg and Birkin’), Gainsbourg struggles with Serge’s purportedly contradictory nature. In Gainsbourg and His Girls, director Pascal Forneri divides the documentary through title sequences intended to reflect the facets of Gainsbourg’s personality, constantly reiterating similar points to Sfar’s biopic – that Gainsbourg’s womanizing and even his musical career stemmed from his own insecurities about his looks. Yet despite attempts by both these filmmakers to render Gainsbourg as a complex and multifaceted figure, he ultimately appears as neither. His womanizing becomes so repetitive that it borders on misogyny.
The last decade has seen a revival of the musical biopic, in films such as Walk the Line, Dreamgirls and Ray. But where Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There successfully portrayed the unknowability of Bob Dylan by dividing the phases of his life into a range of separate characters (played by a stellar ensemble cast), Gainsbourg does not succeed here. I’m Not There deliberately highlights what emerges as an uncomfortable subtext in Gainsbourg – that there is no ‘real’ star, beyond their ever-shifting meanings in the cultural imaginary. While Haynes’ film points to the impossibility of the genre itself, Gainsbourg’s mythologisation of the artist does not attempt to deconstruct Gainsbourg’s star image, but merely revels in its surfaces.
Yosh
26/11/10 - 10:01 PM
Excellent review. Thankyou.