Gainsbourg: Vie héroïque
Joann Sfar (2010)
It’s August but I’m still surprised how wide a release Gainsbourg is getting in London. The movie has dominated Curzon programmes over the last week or two; it’s on Odeon screens too. Hard to believe that, nearly twenty years after his death, Serge Gainsbourg has any sizeable following in this country and the actor who plays him, Eric Elmosnino, isn’t a name over here either (he had a supporting role in the recent Father of My Children). I know Gainsbourg best – I guess most British people do – for ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’ and it turns out the movie’s full, official title for release in the UK is Gainsbourg (Je t’aime … moi non plus). Since that title is otherwise pointless, it seems curious that it’s hardly being used in advertising. (I noticed it only when the certificate appeared on the screen at the start of the film.) But perhaps the picture’s distributors, having tried to find words to enhance its commercial prospects, got cold feet and decided that any hint of a film-not-in-the-English-language is bad for box office. The movie’s full title in French is Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque). That seems to make clear the writer-director Joann Sfar’s attitude towards the subject of his film. Unless the ‘heroic life’ is ironic, and it’s soon plain that it’s not.
Sfar is best known (so far) as a comic book author, and has published a graphic ‘biography’ novel of Serge Gainsbourg – although he explains, in an engaging and absorbing interview available on YouTube, that he prepared the script for the film before he did the book. After elegant, witty animated titles, the movie opens with a scene of a little boy, Serge, and a little girl on a beach. Your first thought is: how come so many subjects of screen biographies experienced a seminal moment at the seaside? But that suggestion of biopic cliché turns out to be deceptive and Joann Sfar continues to surprise. He changed my mind about his use of a figure called, in the credits, La Gueule (the ‘mug’, as in ‘ugly mug’). La Gueule is Gainsbourg’s alter-ego-cum-self-image, repeatedly shadowing and arguing with him. Incarnated by Doug Jones, he towers over Eric Elmosnino, in a cartoon-creature mask with an enormous, pointy schnozz that emphasises the size of Gainsbourg’s own nose. The emergence of this figure is dramatically convincing. It materialises from, and as, a grotesquely bulbous anti-Semitic caricature, which the pre-adolescent Serge Gainsbourg sees on a Paris street poster. Drawing in a sketch book at the family home, Serge eventually emaciates and elongates the figure (he calls him Professor Flipus). Eric Elmosnino’s profile is so extraordinary that La Gueule at first struggles to upstage him physiognomically; and there are times when you wonder if Sfar is using this device merely to stop himself drifting into traditional biopic. Yet La Gueule’s presence becomes so insistent that it becomes unarguable – his identity is clear enough but never quite pinned down. Serge Gainsbourg moved into the world of popular music and celebrity from classical music beginnings and art school training (subsidised by piano-playing in night clubs). La Gueule, continually deploring this prostitution of his art, seems to represent Gainsbourg’s Jewish guilty conscience. In a conversation with his daughters late on in the film, Gainsbourg explains that the figure ‘is’ his elder brother, who died in infancy (a biographical fact).
The young Serge is wonderfully played by Kacey Mottet Klein, who has a sparky, fearless eccentricity that’s not at all self-conscious. Eric Elmosnino, initially at least, has a real spiritual connection with Mottet Klein. In his first scene, in an art school lecture room, Elmosnino moves his fingers with a nervous rapidity that uncannily evokes the child who’s just disappeared from the story. The connection isn’t maintained – there are times when Elmosnino is opaque – but Sfar occasionally and surreally inserts the boy Serge in a scene as if to remind us that the child is father to the man. Eventually, Elmosnino ages so convincingly, with very good make-up, that the older Gainsbourg (who died at the age of sixty-two in 1991) seems somehow the father of his younger self. Gainsbourg assumes knowledge of its subject which I didn’t have. If I had had, I would probably have appreciated Sfar’s approach all the more – in a biopic of a singer whose life I knew about, I’d likely have been grateful for the elision of information that I already knew. Even not knowing about Gainsbourg’s affairs with Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis) and Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta), it was refreshing not to have them parcelled up with explanations of how they started and why they ended. And because the film’s style is unrealistic, Sfar keeps at bay until it’s over questions about Gainsbourg’s real life. (What happened to his sisters? Did he have no friends, only lovers? As an adult, he seems an improbably isolated figure.)
The director nevertheless shows a sure touch in handling more conventional narrative dynamics in the description of Gainsbourg’s life with Jane Birkin, at least in its first, ecstatic stages. He never gets round to telling us whether Gainsbourg – evidently a male jolie laide – was surprised by his ability to attract legendary beauties. (In that opening beach scene, Serge asks the little girl he’s with if he can kiss her and she refuses because ‘You’re too ugly’.) In any case, when he gets together with Birkin, he seems to have a new sexual self-confidence and freedom, which Eric Elmosnino expresses very eloquently. Birkin is played by Lucy Gordon, a young British actress who committed suicide shortly after filming ended (and to whom Sfar dedicates Gainsbourg). Her appearance is bound to be poignant once you know that – but I didn’t know until afterwards and I still found her vivacity piercing, perhaps anticipating the decline and eventual end of Birkin’s and Gainsbourg’s relationship. On the whole, Gainsbourg seems to move quickly but there are a couple of noticeably extended sequences in which Sfar achieves, through that extension and without evidently working for this effect, remarkable emotional power. During the Nazi occupation of Paris, the young Serge arrives at the crack of dawn to collect his yellow star (and make fun of the Vichy minor officials on duty). As he leaves, he passes down an endless line of vanquished faces, of all ages, in the queue for yellow stars. The pacific nature of Gainsbourg’s early life with Birkin is funnily and imaginatively expressed in a scene when she finds him curled up naked on their bed, with the beloved bull terrier she’s bought him forming a similar shape beside him, and she photographs them.
In the YouTube interview, Sfar says that he aimed to make a musical rather than a biopic and, essentially, he succeeds. At least, he presents art and music – then, overwhelmingly, music alone – as dominating Gainsbourg’s life. These seem not just motive forces but the substance of Gainsbourg, his essential perspective on the world. What Sfar doesn’t do, however (he evidently didn’t want to do it – yet I wish he had), is get into the question of how Gainsbourg came to engage successfully with so many styles and eras of pop music – Wikipedia lists ‘jazz, ballads, mambo, lounge, reggae, pop (including adult contemporary pop, kitsch pop, yé-yé pop, ’80s pop, pop-art pop, prog pop, space-age pop, psychedelic pop, and erotic pop), disco, calypso, Africana, bossa nova and rock and roll’. Perhaps it was because Gainsbourg had naturally eclectic tastes and creativity, or always considered himself a rebel, or both; on the basis of what we see here, though, he seems just to be a mildly opportunistic chameleon. Although he illustrates Gainsbourg’s appetite for moral and political controversy (there’s a weak scene, after he’s scandalised French patriots with a reggae version of ‘La marseillaise’, in which he confronts his critics and they start singing the national anthem along with him), Sfar doesn’t explain his protagonist’s popular longevity.
Sfar also talks on YouTube about wanting to make a film the texture of which reflected the clichés of Paris love stories and love songs, although I’m not sure those are the clichés that register most strongly. Gainsbourg’s parents, Joseph and Olga Ginsburg, were Russian Jews who fled to France after the 1917 Revolution and their presentation in the film seems uncertain: the Ginsburgs (Razvan Vasilescu and Dinara Droukarova) come across as the standard caricatures of biopic Jewish parents in various respects – driving their son towards a career in high culture, eventually willing and proud to trade that ambition for his commercial success, doing light-relief routines involving borscht. Still, other caricatures in the film are enjoyable. Among the better-known names in the cast, Yolande Moreau and Claude Chabrol make brief, vividly over-the-top appearances as, respectively, a whory old chanteuse whose off-colour songs the child Serge loves, and Gainsbourg’s record producer, reacting to a first hearing of ‘Je t’aime …‘
From what I heard of it here and in spite of its supposedly infinite variety, I don’t much like Gainsbourg’s music – with the exception of ‘Je t’aime … ‘ and, especially, ‘Poupée de cire, poupée de son’. The main, though not unexpected, disappointment of Gainsbourg is not getting to hear this greatest-ever Eurovision song. Sfar covers Gainsbourg’s work with France Gall (Sara Forestier) and her pushy father (Roger Mollien) with a bit of her singing ‘Baby Pop’ and reference in the dialogue to the notorious ‘Les sucettes’ (‘Lollipops’) – both of which were released in the year following Gall’s success in Eurovision. The contest may nowadays be cool as camp but it’s still evidently taboo to a self-respecting artist like Joann Sfar. Never mind: I enjoyed Gainsbourg a lot and I like it even more in retrospect. It’s a labour of love and admiration for its subject, and a work of real artistry.
5 August 2010
