As a student of French, as well as Spanish, I thought it was time to review an oeuvre française. Therefore, my subject for dissection this week is Joann Sfar's Gainsbourg (2010), a "surrealist", larger-than-life biopic charting the tarnished life of controversial French singer and artist, Serge Gainsbourg. You perhaps aren't too familiar with the name, but you will be with the music. The suggestive tones of Jane Birkin's voice in the Gainsbourg-Birkin collaboration, Je t'aime, are well-etched in many people's minds.
The film charts Gainsbourg's life from a nervous young piano prodigy and artist under his father's strict rule to chain-smoking enfant terrible. French actor Eric Elmosnino steals the show as the adult Gainsbourg. I don't think they could have found a better actor to portray the role if they had tried. Elmosnino is suitably rugged and perverse in his performance, with a near perfect physical likeness, to the effect that one of my friends, while watching the film, was sporadically recoiling. What is interesting is that this live action film is permeated with animation, mainly puppet caricatures of Jewish people, including a creepy representation of himself, which deeply haunts him. The film suggests that ever since his wartime persecuted childhood, Gainsbourg has been overshadowed by anti-semitism. While I enjoyed this bizzare dimension of the film, some may prefer a strictly down-to-earth biography.
The supporting cast are noteworthy too, the late Lucy Gordon plays Gainsbourg's long-time lover, the English actress/singer Jane Birkin; and Laetitia Casta plays Gainsbourg's preceding lover, the ever-sultry Brigitte Bardot. The music is an appropriate collection of Gainsbourg's songs, some of which are performed by Elmosnino himself, which, like Marmite, you'll either love or hate. Sfar's direction is wonderful, more's the pity that his filmography is depressingly thin.
In some ways this is an art-house film of the life of Gainsbourg, art for art's sake, you might say. In my opinion, this is a damn good effort at piecing together the life of a seldom-treated subject.
The film charts Gainsbourg's life from a nervous young piano prodigy and artist under his father's strict rule to chain-smoking enfant terrible. French actor Eric Elmosnino steals the show as the adult Gainsbourg. I don't think they could have found a better actor to portray the role if they had tried. Elmosnino is suitably rugged and perverse in his performance, with a near perfect physical likeness, to the effect that one of my friends, while watching the film, was sporadically recoiling. What is interesting is that this live action film is permeated with animation, mainly puppet caricatures of Jewish people, including a creepy representation of himself, which deeply haunts him. The film suggests that ever since his wartime persecuted childhood, Gainsbourg has been overshadowed by anti-semitism. While I enjoyed this bizzare dimension of the film, some may prefer a strictly down-to-earth biography.
The supporting cast are noteworthy too, the late Lucy Gordon plays Gainsbourg's long-time lover, the English actress/singer Jane Birkin; and Laetitia Casta plays Gainsbourg's preceding lover, the ever-sultry Brigitte Bardot. The music is an appropriate collection of Gainsbourg's songs, some of which are performed by Elmosnino himself, which, like Marmite, you'll either love or hate. Sfar's direction is wonderful, more's the pity that his filmography is depressingly thin.
In some ways this is an art-house film of the life of Gainsbourg, art for art's sake, you might say. In my opinion, this is a damn good effort at piecing together the life of a seldom-treated subject.