Charlotte Gainsbourg he hated talking about his parents. She wanted to get away from the shadow that had been cast over her since she was born, to stop being the object of comparisons and hearing that she neither sings as well as her father did nor is she as beautiful as her mother was. He, Serge Gainsbourg, one of the greatest French artists of all time; her, Jane Birkin, personification of glamor in the swinging London of the 60s and in the unbridled Paris of the 70s. “The press kept asking me about them,” the actress and singer-songwriter tells us. “And I couldn’t help but get defensive, even hostile.”
But that’s no longer true. “I have learned to reflect on both in public, because I have understood that in my country they are considered national treasures,” says Gainsbourg. And hers, two new artistic initiatives of hers, in fact, are separate tributes -or “love letters”, as she herself defines them- to her father and her mother. On the one hand, she has spent the last few months promoting her first feature film as a director, the documentary ‘Jane for Charlotte’, an intimate and tender portrait of Birkin traced through a succession of conversations between mother and daughter -next Friday premieres in Spain-; and she, meanwhile, has been working on the house where the legendary musician spent more than 20 years to turn it into a museum, which is scheduled to open in the coming weeks. “My friends make fun of my tendency to get into trouble, but what else could I do? Both projects are a debt I owed to the public.”
live death
Charlotte was only 19 years old when, in 1991, her father’s death from a heart attack was experienced live by hundreds of thousands of fans. “It was terrible to experience the duel in the face of collective scrutiny; people insisted on showing me affection, but it was hateful for me to share dad’s memory with strangers,” he laments, and his words explain why it has taken 30 years to open the paternal residence, converted at that time into a pilgrimage center and whose facade has been completely covered with devout graffiti.
Located on the Parisian Rue de Verneuil, the ‘Maison Gainsbourg’ will consist of an exhibition area, a bookstore and a piano bar. When the mother and daughter visit him during the course of ‘Jane for Charlotte’, however, the apartment looks the same as it did when the musician died. The film shows us a space cluttered with tapestries, instruments and perfume bottles, decorated with a sculpture modeled after Birkin and a chandelier over the bathtub, and still full of tin cans in the kitchen and even leftovers in the fridge.. We also see an imposing medicine cabinet. “Serge and I were on a lot of sleeping pills,” says Birkin during the scene. “And we would spend the day drinking. It was crazy.”
Gainsbourg assumes that for a long time he neglected the relationship with his mother. “Now I know that Mom always thought I preferred Dad, and I understand that. I lost him too soon and put him on a pedestal; I was always talking about him.” Making the documentary was the way to strengthen ties with him, but at the beginning of the shooting Birkin did not understand it that way. “I started our first conversation by asking her very direct questions, like, ‘Why don’t you treat my stepsisters like you treat me?'” explains the director.
“And she thought I wanted to attack her, and she wasn’t prepared to fight back.” From that moment, the project remained in dry dock for two years. “Mom finally understood my need to find answers to questions that had plagued me all my life, and to distinguish the mother from the icon.”
Of the trivial and the tragic
Much has happened since the London model and actress participated in titles such as ‘Blow Up’ (1966) and ‘The Pool’ (1969) before meeting in Paris who would be the love of her life and interpreting the erotic anthem with him ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ (1969), whose torridness scandalized half the world. “There comes a time when you no longer recognize yourself in the mirror,” Birkin laments in a scene from the new documentary. “So you remove the mirrors from your house.”
At 74, she was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, and on September 6 he suffered a stroke from which he completely recovered. “My mother and I have the same kind of conflict with our image,” explains Gainsbourg. “It was very difficult for me to accept my physique; my father used to tell me that I was an orchid disguised as a nettle, and his words gave me a complex. And mother, as incredible as it may seem, she never believed she was beautiful.”
“I had a hard time accepting my physique, my father used to tell me that I was an orchid disguised as a nettle”
‘Jane for Charlotte’ shows the two women in Birkin’s house in Brittany, cooking lamb and sharing laughter on the bed, chatting about breast sizes and dog farts but also, of course, touching on painful subjects.
The British woman, for example, confesses that she is plagued by fear of not having been a good mother. “I’ve spent my life feeling guilty, and wondering if she could have done things differently.” And she is unable to hide her pain when, at one point in the film, she comes across a childhood image of her oldest daughter, Kate Barry -fruit of her marriage to the English composer John Barry-, fashion photographer who died in 2013 after falling from the balcony of her apartment in Paris.
“When Kate died, Mom was too down to pay attention to me”
That death destroyed several things within the family. “When Kate died, Mom was too down to pay attention to me, she was devastated too,” says Gainsbourg, who decided to leave France for New York shortly after the tragedy. “Today I feel guilty for having left and spent six years away from my mother and my little sister,” acknowledges the director in reference to the singer and actress. Lou Doillonthat Birkin had with the filmmaker Jacques Doillon. “But I needed to get away from everything to recover with Yvan and the children.” Director Yvan Attal He has been his sentimental partner for three decades, and in that time they have had three children.
“My father was only able to show me his paternal love if there was a microphone or a camera in front of him.
the youngest of them, Joe Attal, also appears in ‘Jane for Charlotte’. “It’s funny how we children end up repeating what our parents did,” says Gainsbourg resignedly. After all, she herself worked alongside her father on two occasions when she was a child, and both times the scandal came: in 1984, when she was 13 years old, they recorded the song ‘Lemon Incest’ as a duet, which chronicled a disturbingly intimate father-son relationship, and two years later they co-starred in ‘Charlotte For Ever’ (1986), about a man who develops a sexual attraction to his daughter. “My father was only able to show me his paternal love if there was a microphone or a camera in front of him; in private he never expressed real affection to me. And of course, he was always attracted by the possibility of provoking and shocking. I suppose that is something that I inherited from him”, adds Gainsbourg, whose filmography includes such controversial titles as ‘Antichrist’ (2009) and ‘Nymphomaniac’ (2014), which he shot for the Danish Lars from Trier and include numerous explicit sex scenes.
The actress also attributes her daring in front of the camera as an adult to the pain that being exposed to it caused her in childhood.. “Living exposed to the spotlight, and to the ridicule of other children for things that my father had said or done, marked me a lot and made me put on a shell from a very young age, and for decades filming has been the only space where I dared to take it off.” Now, ‘Jane for Charlotte’ seems to work as a symbolic act of destroying that shield. “Since I can remember, my relationship with my mother has always been conditioned by modesty, and by shame, and by my fear of accepting who I am and where I come from. There were never any manifestations of love or tenderness between us. But now I need those things from her. And I have decided to claim them.”