Cinema and the Soul of Serge Gainsbourg

One of the finest short films I have seen is a documentary titled Essay on the Birth of a Song. It was made in 1968 by Yves Lefebvre, and it follows, in fragmentary but close detail, the evolution of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Initials B.B.”, a haunting pop ode to Brigitte Bardot. (It is available in the splendid DVD boxset De Serge Gainsbourg à Gainsbarre 1958-1991.)

The Gainsbourg we see in this film is a long way from the standard mythology of the French singer-songwriter. He is not drunken, dissolute, hurling out obscene provocations or romancing beautiful women; not the Gainsbourg associated with songs like the sexy 1960s anthem “Je t’aime … moi non plus”.

Instead, we see him obsessively at work: composing at the piano, working with his British arranger Arthur Greenslade (1923-2003), going for take after take in the recording studio. The closing shots of him listening, attentively and joyfully, to the final mix constitute one of the truest and loveliest homages to the real Gainsbourg.

Serge, however, liked to hide the real Gainsbourg. Late in his career, he tweaked his stage name to Gainsbarre. “Gainsbarre is the showman,” he explained. “Gainsbourg is the whole person.” But even if he could joke about this split in his persona, it caused him grief, all the same – which is among the major themes of Joann Sfar’s clever biopic, Gainsbourg, A Heroic Life (2010), a film which gets better on repeat viewings.

Throughout 2004 and 2005, Jane Birkin (1946-2023), Gainsbourg’s partner 1968-1980, did her bit for the rehabilitation of his artistic reputation with a splendid touring show, Arabesque. Although his stature as a pop legend has never declined in France, it has taken English-speaking countries much longer to catch on. There has been, however, a steady trickle of Gainsbourg remixes, re-interpretations, homages and tribute concerts since the mid 1990s, including four fine albums (based on English translations of the extremely complex lyrics) by The Bad Seeds member Mick Harvey.

Nonetheless, most of us are still a long way from appreciating the full scope of Gainsbourg’s output. As well as a musical performer, composer and producer, he was also a painter, novelist and – least known of all – a filmmaker.

In France, any director who is not in some way aligned with the formidable legacy of the Nouvelle Vague has a hard time receiving critical credibility, at least in influential publications like the film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, the newspapers Le Monde and Libération, or the groovy culture-guide Les Inrockuptibles. As Michel Ciment (1938-2023) once observed, these institutions mark out a veritable Bermuda Triangle where many fine artists disappear without a kind word.

Gainsbourg, however, had an altogether different cultural cachet which won him fans in all sectors, even though his film background and preferences were relatively square.

He did not carve out his cinema career through a Nouvelle Vague apprenticeship. He worked as an actor in Italian sword-and-sandal epics, composed scores for solidly mainstream directors including Bertrand Blier and Claude Berri, bonded with outliers like William Klein and Robert Benayoun, and creatively supervised a staggering number of glossy advertisements and music videos (some of which – such as his clip for “Lemon Incest”, his incendiary duet with daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg – are classics of their type).

Gainsbourg’s soul-connection was not to the freewheeling, anarchic, shoot-in-the-streets style of early Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but the more refined school of cinematic surrealism – as shown in his collaboration with surrealist writer-director-critic Benayoun on the fascinating and generally undervalued feature films Paris Doesn’t Exist (1969) and Serious as Pleasure (1975).

It was the American director Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil, 1948) who, noticing Gainsbourg always hanging around attentively near the camera on the set of Romance of a Horsethief (1971), urged him: “Go make a film, do it!” Gainsbourg’s subsequent work as a feature director comprises four unusual, demanding movies: Je t’aime moi non plus (1975) named after his 1967 song; Équateur (1983) from a Georges Simenon novel; Charlotte For Ever (1986) in which Gainsbourg also stars; and finally Stan the Flasher (1990).

There is much that connects these films – Équateur, as his only adaptation of another artist’s work and universe, standing somewhat apart from the rest. Charlotte For Ever and Stan the Flasher constitute two variations on the same archetypal Gainsbourgian tale: an ageing writer (in both cases named Stan) is unable to break through to fame either through determination or compromise (producers and managers always appear as monosyllabic, gangster-like figures in suits – even when played by Gainsbourg himself!); equally dissolute friends (a real-life reference point may be the notorious radical-chic entrepreneur Jean-Pierre Rassam) offer boozy companionship but no real help.

This set-up suggests an inversion of the basic situation of Paris Doesn’t Exist: there, Gainsbourg plays counsel to a young but ‘classically’ visionary modernist painter (Richard Leduc) who is out of step with the hollow, conceptualist conceits of contemporary art.

In his degraded state in the Gainsbourg films, Stan is reduced to tutoring fairly clueless teenage girls in languages and literature (much Shakespeare and poetry is erratically recited). This arrangement tempts the Stan-figure into (as we say today) inappropriate behaviours that inevitably precipitate his undoing. For Flasher Stan, suicide follows a bout of humiliating imprisonment; in Charlotte For Ever, the ending is, with an unexpected turn, sunnier.

In Stan the Flasher, the central protagonist faces a disintegrating marriage (the wife is played with intensity by Chantal Akerman’s fetish actor, Aurore Clément); while in Charlotte For Ever, the unseen wife has died in a horrendous road accident (aerial shots of the flames are frequently inserted as transitional passages) – a backstory which Jane Birkin cheerfully acknowledged as a death-wish fantasy visited upon her in the wake of the difficult split from Gainsbourg.

However, this dark tale has a redemptive element absent from Stan the Flasher: the presence of teenage daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, whose performance here is remarkable. (And the spectacle of her hair-washing at the bathtub, as she sways to music, is incredible.)

Both these films are, for the most part, hermetic chamber dramas – Charlotte For Ever making particularly spectacular use of the sets and lighting possible in the Billancourt studios. (One needs to compare Alain Resnais’ Not on the Lips [2003] to find again such palpable, modern-day delight in the meticulous artifice of studio work – a setting which Gainsbourg reveals in a final, stunning crane shot reminiscent of Jerry Lewis’ reflexive games of the 1960s.)

Stan the Flasher breaks up its agonies of the interior – Berri giving a superb performance in a role that many actors would surely find uncomfortable (Serge had to fake a heart attack to convince him to take it on) – with a slow-motion primal scene of the hero flashing his genitals to the teen goddess (Élodie Bouchez) who will forever elude him.

Stan the Flasher is a short feature (at 67 minutes), but Gainsbourg binds its elements by beginning with an implied POV structure – Bouchez amidst a group of girls, looking gravely into the camera – that only pays off near the end. There is a strange sadness to the film, encapsulated in this rendez-vous manqué of sorts between Stan and Élodie; in Gainsbourg, an inflated sense of the tragic jostles with a mocking and ironic self-pity (a characteristic of many of his best songs, such as “Overseas Telegram”).

As always, Gainsbourg structures the soundtrack on the concerted repetition of just a few tunes (his own), here arranged in his favoured, Philippe Lerichomme-produced techno-disco style of the ‘80s.

The combined aura of hermeticism, degradation and artifice brings Rainer Werner Fassbinder to mind – especially his mid ‘70s work from Martha (1974) to Chinese Roulette (1976), with a special touch of Satan’s Brew (1976) for general outrageousness and sardonic self-wallowing in masculine defeat. As if to tip the hat and acknowledge this influence, Gainsbourg cast Barbara Sukowa from Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Lola (1981) as the female lead in Équateur.

This is the least resolved and satisfying of Gainsbourg’s films, but it exerts a balmy, queasy fascination. It is stranded between aiming to be an ambient murder story (in the vein of Louis Malle or Bertrand Tavernier) set in politically charged French-colonial Africa – high on atmospherics but lacking virtually any plot intrigue – or concentrating instead on the blind sexual obsession of its blank hero, Timar (Francis Huster), for the blowsy signora di tutti, Adele (Sukowa).

Many allusions flow through the piece – to The Postman Always Rings Twice, to Josef von Sternberg – but nothing much gels in any memorable or distinctive fashion, and the political dimension shrinks to virtually nothing.

Although Gainsbourg congratulated himself after the fact by claiming that his African friends found the film an authentic record of feel and rhythm of their country, Équateur wins no prizes for its supposedly post/de-colonial representation of blacks: they are mostly set in static arrangements as multiple extras, standing to attention or lazily lying down in geometric formations.

It is illuminating to return, today, to Gainsbourg’s inaugural feature, Je t’aime moi non plus, having already immersed oneself in the later work. It is at once a singular production in his œuvre – particularly in its starry cast of Birkin and Joe Dallesandro, as well as Michel Blanc and Gérard Depardieu in smaller roles – and an already perfect encapsulation of the sensibility and approach of Gainsbourg as auteur.

In its day, it must have appeared essentially to be a work in dialogue with Blier’s provocative success Les Valseuses (Going Places, 1974) – “a film of truly cynical decadence” to Roger Ebert! – but it turned out to be the entrée to a uniquely Gainsbourgian cinema.

Set in a geographically indeterminate wasteland – sometimes assumed to represent America, although nothing literally indicates this beyond the vaguely Western generic trappings of the storyline (a bar in the middle of nowhere where strangers come and go, as in Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar [1954]) – Je t’aime moi non plus is a veritable treatise on abjection in all its forms and manifestations.

The coherence of the film on this level is stunning, encompassing everything from the occupation of the main trucker characters (picking up discarded junk from one spot and taking it to another), to a panoply of bodily functions (pissing, shitting … ), through to the detailed agony-and-ecstasy of its sexual acts (Birkin as Johnny pretending to be a boy in order to excite Dallesandro as Krassky into anally penetrating her – which becomes a running gag every time they are evicted from hotels because of her screams of pain!).

It’s not just a wallow in the dirt for the shocking hell of it; a philosophy of abjection informs all Gainsbourg’s subsequent films (toilets, for instance, are a recurring fixture – and Serge’s vomiting in close-up is a main attraction of Charlotte For Ever). From the opening credits scene – a focus on the familiar woman-icon on the front of a truck signalling conventional macho, but giving way to a camera movement that reveals Krassky driving while cradling in his lap the head of his partner, Padovan (Hugues Quester) – Je t’aime moi non plus is the most profoundly queer portrait of the human race in extremis (impelled by obsession, jealousy, violent flare-ups) that Gainsbourg ever conjured.

This and Charlotte For Ever are his best films (they were also, by the by, his most commercially successful).

Gainsbourg’s favourite word, when talking about his creative process, was rigour. He mastered the technicalities of filmmaking with the same fervour as he had previously mastered the recording studio. In an extensive interview with Positif magazine published in February 1987 (no. 312 – the dossier includes a detailed filmography), he casually described initiation into the art of cinema via his immersion in the history of painting: “One cannot understand Francis Bacon if one has not studied the primitives, the Italians, Delacroix, Manet, the Impressionists, the Fauves.”

His taste in cinema was mainly American (Howard Hawks, John Huston) – only one French director, Malle, drew his unmitigated praise – but the figure he most identified with was Stanley Kubrick. Apart from their common regard for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – and Sue Lyons’ “miscasting” (according to Serge) in that role notwithstanding – Gainsbourg sought to emulate Kubrick’s expressionism.

He hated those lenses which “correspond to normal vision”, and rejected the aesthetic approach that insisted the camera should be placed level, eye-to-eye with the characters – one of the fundamental principles of the Nouvelle Vague crowd. Gainsbourg, who meticulously storyboarded every scene in his movies, loved instead to switch in an extreme way from long-shot to close-up, and frequently kept the camera titled at a low or high angle.

Charlotte For Ever contains his most dazzling work on this level, in collaboration with the prodigiously gifted DOP Willy Kurant (who shot three of his features as well as other of his film and video projects), and in strict sync with a stylised soundscape of music, effects and ultra close-up voices –not even Gainsbourg’s albums capture his voice, breath and assorted vocal emanations with such intimacy.

Gainsbourg harboured many film projects, including a “moral tale” titled Black Out for which, in the late ‘70s, he auditioned Isabelle Adjani, Roman Polanski, Robert Mitchum, Dirk Bogarde and Alain Delon – the financing never came together for it; and a take on Robinson Crusoe to star Christophe Lambert. But death caught up with him in 1991, at age 63. His archives surely contain the traces of many other film ideas.

Berri commented: “Serge wanted to be recognised as a filmmaker, and he felt a little disregarded, underestimated. But I believe the cinema of Gainsbourg is as important as his songs. Gainsbourg’s soul is a totality, and you cannot exclude cinema from Gainsbourg’s soul”.

© Adrian Martin June 2005 / April 2021 (+ 2026 updates)