Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)

There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.

Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would  inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.

Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point.  Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.

The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.

As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.

IMDB link

viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)

Music and Lyrics (***1/4)

? Offered the chance to write a single for a Britney-esque pop star, a has-been singer-songwriter (Hugh Grant) recruits a non-professional (Drew Barrymore) to write the lyrics.
+ These two parts seem ideally suited to the strengths of its stars, Grant the awkward-suave songwriter, Barrymore the ditzy-brainy plant waterer. Grant is probably one of the few actors who can work the word “moribund” into a conversation and have it sound natural. But equally crucial to the movie’s success is the music, much of it composed by Fountains of Wayne leader Adam Schlesinger, who also re-created the 1960s sounds of That Thing You Do! The film’s opening is the music video for “Pop! Goes My Heart,” the signature song of the Wham!-like band co-led by Grant’s Alex Fletcher in the 1980s. This segment sets the tone by being both catchy and authentic sounding enough that you can easily believe it would have been a hit when Tears for Fears and Duran Duran ruled the chart. Hugh even sings the songs credited to Alex on screen. Also believable is the waifish pop princess, played by Haley Bennett, who takes most of the other vocals and gets not a few laughs. She’s kooky without being over the top. For writer-director Marc Lawrence, this is a step or three up from the Sandra Bullock vehicles (Forces of Nature, Miss Congeniality, Two Weeks Notice) that form the bulk of his résumé. As with the music, there’s an appealing sincerity to the characters.
- The process whereby Alex turns his plant waterer into his cowriter seems about as unnatural as you’d think it would, and the storyline seems too accelerated.
= ***1/4 Hugh and Drew make beautiful music. It’s more like a fun pop hit than a classic album, though.

IMDB link

reviewed 2/14/07