Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (2010)

Biographical films are hardly ever models of accuracy. Lives usually don't fit neatly and squarely into the prerequisites of a screenwriter's requirements and frequently changes, large or small, need to be made to achieve some sort of dramatic coherence. Sometimes the changes are quite small in the overall scheme of things (Raging Bull and Patton spring to mind, at least in terms of relatively contemporary biographical films), while at other times facts are thrown by the wayside in order to advance questionable agendas (I'm on record decrying the outright falsifications in Frances, which took me years of research to unravel). Typically, though, biographical films (especially those made in Hollywood) tend to gussy up their subjects, over glamorizing them (Cole Porter was no Night and Day Cary Grant) in order to make them palatable to the paying public. The fact that Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life bears such a provocative soubriquet might lead some to believe that this is yet another massively fictionalized attempt to lacquer on a patina of respectability and iconization to a figure who was at the very least rather controversial in his heyday (more about that later), but nothing could be further from the truth. While Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life plays a little fast and loose with the historical record, what it really does is inject something that is all too rarely experienced in biographical films: a sense of playfulness.

Serge Gainsbourg may not be a name many of you are overly familiar with, and yet chances are you've probably heard at least one of his most famous songs, 1969's international chartbuster "Je t'aime. . .moi non plus," a single that was banned in its original version by Gainsbourg and his longtime lover Jane Birkin (their daughter is Charlotte Gainsbourg) because it supposedly contained provocative sounds of a woman experiencing orgasm (listening to the original version today is an exercise in relative modesty compared to some of the explicit stuff that regularly makes the airwaves). (There was actually an original version featuring Brigitte Bardot that wasn't released until the late eighties.) But the melody was taken over by any number of artists and it became a substantial chart hit for Tim Mycroft and Paul Buckmaster in the United States under the band name Sounds Nice (a name allegedly bequeathed on the band by one Paul McCartney after he heard some advance tapes of the project), and later was fodder for such middle of the road artists as Paul Mauriat, who also had a minor chart hit with his version.

Like so many Jewish artists (Gainsbourg was born Lucien Ginsburg) who experienced childhood through the prism of World War II, Gainsbourg escaped into a world of fantasy where the horrors of Nazism could only tangentially find him. Writer-director Joann Sfar (a male) first published a graphic novel about Gainsbourg some years ago and then adapted that work into this often haunting 2010 film, bringing along his illustrator's consciousness to the work. In fact Sfar depicts Gainsbourg's interior flights of fancy with a number of inventive quasi-animated elements, including a huge head which leaps off of a wartime French poster warning people to be wary of Jews and which then chases the young Lucien down a fog-enshrouded French alleyway, and, later, a recurring gargantuan and somewhat monstrous character that resembles something like a port over from an unknown Tim Burton film, a character that seems to be Gainsbourg's Id in its guise as either The Assimilated Jew or, by Gainsbourg's own self-definition, The Devil himself. (The two may not have been separate entities in Gainsbourg's somewhat conflicted emotional life.)

Sfar repeatedly ping-pongs between Gainsbourg's interior life, especially that of the child Lucien, and external events, where the self-rechristened Serge finds his desires to be a painter keep getting sidelined by his seemingly innate ability to make a living (meager though it may be) as a lounge pianist. Sfar found a rather remarkable Gainsbourg doppelganger in actor Eric Elmosnino (who won the César for his performance), but the similarities are not merely skin deep. Elmosnino inhabits Gainsbourg's charming radicalism with unerring élan and anchors the more whimsical elements of the film in something at least approaching a grounded sense of reality. Gainsbourg was something of a ladies' man, and the film deals somewhat discursively with his better-known affairs, including assignations with Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis), Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon, who committed suicide before the film's release), and most famously (if not most importantly to Gainsbourg himself) Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta). It's actually in this element that Sfar may not do his subject absolute justice, as these women simply seem to come and go without much emotional resonance, which in the case of Birkin at least is manifestly inaccurate in terms of what the real-life Gainsbourg experienced.MS18pp

The film is more accurate and more involving in its portrayal as Gainsbourg as an agent provocateur. While "Je t'aime. . .moi no plus" may be his best known international cause célèbre, in France he was at least as well known for the huge controversy raised by his song "Les Sucettes (Lollipops)", a gigantic hit for the appropriately named Gallic singer France Gall. On its surface the song was a childlike paean to suckers, but which was, in fact, a thinly veiled series of references about oral sex. Gall, an innocent young teenager at the time, evidently had absolutely no clue about the song's hidden meaning, and her naïve interpretation actually added to its allure for a certain class of listener and in fact for Gainsbourg himself, who congratulated himself on having created the most risqué song to ever make the top of the pops. Gainsbourg delighted in pushing the boundaries of commonly accepted social mores throughout his career, but always in a strangely populist (and often quite popular) fashion, and Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life brings that aspect of its subject's career fully alive.