Film review: Gainsbourg

Published on Thursday 29 July 2010 12:47

GAINSBOURG (15) *** DIRECTED BY: JOANN SFAR STARRING: ERIC ELMOSNINO, LUCY GORDON, LAETITIA CASTA, DOUG JONES, ANNA MOUGLALIS

THE trouble with most recent biopics is that they tend to celebrate unconventional lives in the most conventional way possible.

Never mind if a singer/artist/writer/musician helped change the world in some small or large way by pushing boundaries and shaking up the status quo. If a film can run through the flashpoint moments of their life while giving an A-lister (or A-list wannabe) the opportunity to have a crowd-pleasing Stars in their Eyes moment, the chances are this will be the route by which their artistic genius will end up being portrayed on screen. After all, you just have to compare the box office receipts and Oscar hauls of Ray, Walk the Line and La Vie en Rose with more artistic endeavours such as the Ian Curtis film Control, Gus Van Sant's fictional interpretation of Kurt Cobain's demise in Last Days or even the Bob Dylan film I'm Not There to see that genuinely maverick films about genuinely maverick people don't stand a chance against this more specious form of karaoke cinema.

All of which makes Gainsbourg more of a surprise.

The international success of La Vie En Rose (which won Marion Cotillard an Academy Award for her portrayal of Edith Piaf) must have made a by-the-numbers biopic of Serge Gainsbourg - perhaps France's biggest musical legend after the gravelly voiced chanteuse - something of a no-brainer. Yet for a large chunk of this handsomely produced, relatively expensive film, director Joann Sfar mostly breaks free from those strictures to offer something more pleasingly bizarre and in-keeping with his subject's cultural status and importance. Sfar, a comic book artist making his first feature film, takes a surreal and at times wholly imaginary approach to Gainsbourg's life, conjuring up wild flights of fancy that give us a better sense of how the formative moments in Gainsbourg's life shaped him as an artist and as a man than had Sfar simply regurgitated biographical details in straightforward fashion.

Mostly these involve a pair of hideous alter-egos that shadow him throughout his life (likely inspired by Gainsbarre, the Mr Hyde-esque alter-ego Gainsbourg invented for himself later in life).

The first manifests itself while Gainsbourg is still a boy called Lucien Ginsberg living in occupied Paris with his Russian Jewish immigrant parents. Cruelly rebuffed by girls for being "too ugly", forced by the Nazis to wear a yellow star and acutely aware that the streets are lined with grotesque imagery directly aimed at his Jewish heritage, his perceived aesthetic inferiority is reflected in the horrific anti-Semitic cartoon that comes to life and begins to follow him around.

Rather than present Gainsbourg as a victim, though, Sfar shows him subtly drawing strength from this hideous familiar (and all the negativity surrounding it). Developing his own survival strategies, he learns how to talk to women by hanging around art classes (where his skills as a painter also develop) and he defies the Nazis and all that they stood for with sheer schoolboy insolence.

As Gainsbourg enters adulthood (where he's played for the rest of the film with uncanny verisimilitude by Eric Elmosnino), the alter-ego grows into a tall, gangly, hook-nosed puppet-like character with long finger nails. He's there to give full expression to Gainsbourg's insecurities, even as his music career takes off and he finds himself keeping ever more beautiful company with the likes of singer Juliette Greco (Anna Mouglalis), Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon, who committed suicide shortly after filming).

The film is funniest during the scenes with Bardot, not least because they recreate not only the genesis of his most famous song, the sexually provocative Je t'aime… moi non plus, but also the hysteria Bardot kicked up after recording it (she was married at the time), something that resulted in the song eventually being made famous by Gainsbourg's later collaboration with Birkin. It's this latter, much-publicised relationship with Birkin that is presented as his most pivotal as his fame clashes with his inbuilt impudence and need to rebel, sending him into something of a downward spiral of self-parody, scandals and health problems.

That Sfar chooses not to too cram in every juicy scandalous detail here (and there are plenty he could have explored) is both refreshing but oddly restrictive. The film begins to feel as if it is running out of ideas as Gainsbourg gets older and despite the early creative bursts, Sfar, like so many others directors before him, fails to find a way to make indulgent drug-and-alcohol-induced self-destruction seem at all interesting. But that's a relatively minor complaint and the film does pull things back towards the end with a wonderful scene celebrating Gainsbourg's heroic defiance of French right-wing anti-Semitism with his scandal-inducing reggae recording of the national anthem, La Marseillaise. Over all, this remains a refreshingly ambitious take on the life of an artist.