Cinelicious photos
With the death of Jane Birkin, France has lost both an icon and one of its greatest enigmas. To focus on France is not to downplay the fact that Birkin’s death will be mourned around the world. Along with Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Hardy and Catherine Deneuve, Birkin was one of the last surviving women of the 1960s who sparked global interest in French culture.
Except Birkin wasn’t French. She was born in London and has stuck to her English accent all her life. Birkin spoke perfectly but cultivated a fake-naive a way of speaking her adopted language that cemented her persona as an eternal child. To the French, it was all part of her unique charm, established decades earlier… and from which she sometimes struggled to escape.
As the partner and muse of Svengali-like songwriting genius Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin posed for the cover of his album Histoire de Melody Nelson wearing nothing but a red wig and open-waisted blue jeans, a stuffed monkey clutched to her bare chest. Two years earlier, she recorded the erotic duet “Je t’aime moi non plus”, originally written for Bardot. It’s Birkin’s ecstatic moans that echo in the final seconds of the infamous piece, which has led to it being censored in various corners and condemned by the Vatican.
Jane meets Serge in Slogan, a funny if one-off 1969 comedy about a middle-aged advertising man tempted to abandon his pregnant wife after falling for a much younger nymph (played by guess who) . This reluctant sex symbol, who dared to appear naked in Antonioni’s Blow-Up and played the naïve teenager seducing Alain Delon in La piscine, was never a great actor—she had neither the training nor the range to dramatically transformed herself for a role – but she possessed that far rarer, ineffable star quality. When audiences looked at Jane Birkin on screen, they saw Jane Birkin…or they saw the figure that Jane Birkin allowed the audience to believe was the real her, and which may actually have been an elaborate performance of a lifetime.
This paradox was the key to her appeal. Was Birkin a doll shaped by the men in her life, or was she an artist with instinctive talent? Both were true. Birkin’s own diaries, collected and published as “The Munkey Diaries,” reveal much less than fans wanted. Gainsbourg may have encouraged Birkin to become ubiquitous (as she did, appearing in ad campaigns and throwback comedies), but she gradually took control of her own image.
Throughout, Birkin was deeply insecure, as we discover in her two most revealing screenshots: “Jane B. par Agnès V.” and “Jane of Charlotte.” The first is a playful postmodern mockumentary about Birkin by pioneering French filmmaker Agnes Varda, who frames the project to look like the kind of star portraits audiences might see on television, alternating personal interviews (in which the woman opens up in the presence of another woman) with clips of her most famous roles as Joan of Arc or the mythological Greek princess Ariadne, a crime-movie femme fatale or a pie-faced silent comedian – only Birkin was never cast in any of those parts. This manufactured B-roll material was shot specifically for the film as Varda gave the star, then in her early 40s, a chance to play the roles she was denied. (The film is now streaming on the Criterion channel.)
In contrast, Jane of Charlotte is a true documentary made by the daughter of her 12-year relationship with Serge. Charlotte Gainsbourg is one of the boldest and most versatile actors working today, but she can only draw so much from her mother, who has been filmed and photographed and watched and objectified for much of her life. At a certain point in the 80s those years of the last century, she rebelled against the reductive way in which the world saw her. She cut her hair (in Varda’s film it is short) and insisted on performing a live concert at the Bataclan in Paris.
Previous performances include miming to pre-recorded audio; Birkin had something to prove. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, she was the embodiment of a new kind of sex symbol: Swinging London’s ambassador to France. Where Bardot was voluptuous, Birkin was masculine: “boyish”, described in “Melody Nelson”. Tall and slender, with bony hips and a flat chest, Birkin was not considered attractive (this was long before Kate Moss made heroin chic a desirable aesthetic). The public disagreed, of course, and blue-eyed, gap-toothed Jane Birkin still thrives year after year in French cinema – all because she agreed to pose as Gainsbourg’s underage nymph.
Serge’s lyrics tell of a 14-year-old singer whom he hit with his Rolls Royce, then seduced – a provocation which raised eyebrows at the time and which today’s hypersensitivity simply would not allow. Decades later, after collaborating with Varda on “Jane B,” Birkin is set to play the predator in the surprisingly non-scandalous “Kung Fu Master,” in which her character falls in love with an underage boy (played by Varda’s son, Mathieu Demy).
Although painfully shy in real life, Birkin asserted herself in the name of art. She played a diner waitress androgynous enough to seduce a gay truck driver in Gainsbourg’s directorial debut, “Je t’aime moi non plus” (like the song). Gainsbourg considered playing the role himself, but ended up bringing in Joe D’Alessandro, Andy Warhol’s resident stablemate.
If that sounds strange to you, consider Birkin’s scenes in Roger Vadim’s Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman (also available on the Criterion Channel). Bardot plays the main character who takes Birkin to bed. It’s perhaps the sexiest image in all of French cinema (though La piscine comes close), compounded by the fact that we’re watching Gainsbourg’s girlfriend make out with his ex, who was previously married to Vadim. To say these were different times would be an understatement.
Birkin may have been an object early in her career, but by mid-life, she’s shown — with intelligence and class — that she’s on top. By reclaiming her reputation and building a wall around her secrets, Birkin became even more intriguing.