Neuman's Own: Serge Gainsbourg — A Heroic Life
posted in: Features
Remembering Serge Gainsbourg for his propositioning of Whitney Houston or for his recording of Les Sucettes (Lollipops) with France Gall, who had no idea that the song she was singing was about oral sex, is as unjust as remembering Buddy Holly for his Mexican-made, horn-rimmed glasses. We may not realize it, but Gainsbourg was to France what Holly was to America: the master of a quintessentially indigenous expression of pop. In a sense, all pop music belongs somewhere on the spectrum between Holly’s hiccupping nervousness and Gainsbourg’s casual insouciance.
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, out this week, knowingly winks at what director Joann Sfar describes as the horizontal aspects of Gainsbourg’s life. Over the course of the film, Gainsbourg (Eric Elmonsnino) romances many of the era’s most beautiful women, including Juliette Greco (Anna Mouglalis), Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta) and Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon). But its real power is demonstrated when it veers from biographical re-enactment in favor of metaphor. Sfar, an acclaimed graphic novelist in France, whose 2005 The Rabbi’s Cat earned him an Eisner Award, is most comfortable when his hagiography unfolds like a Russian fable”with love and absurdity providing plenty of cameos. As Sfar has said of his hero: Gainsbourg created a character for himself. I don’t want to go around delving into his personal life to discover who he really was¦.I love Gainsbourg too much to bring him back to the realms of reality.
By trying to capture not Gainsbourg but the myth of Gainsbourg in his film, Sfar leaves himself open to not a small degree of criticism from those who are versed in the historical record. Not only does the film elide the aforementioned incidents with Houston and Gal, but also Gainsbourg’s recording of Lemon Incest with twelve-year old daughter Charlotte. Sfar also turns Gainbourg’s recording of La Marseillaise into a bigger controversy than the historical record seems to justify. The sequence plays like a stale re-hashing of Alex Cox’s depiction of the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen.
But to blame Sfar on the basis of historical inaccuracy is like blaming Guillermo del Toro for historical inaccuracy. That’s just not what Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is about. After all, what other biopic you know includes monsters as characters? It’s an aesthetic choice that pays dividends as Gainsbourg himself thought of himself as a kind of monster. I prefer ugliness to beauty, because ugliness endures, he once said.
Sfar’s poetics don’t always seamlessly mesh (call me strange, but I don’t like puppets infiltrating my love scene viewing experiences) with Gainsbourg’s, but even the ensuing standstill proves entertaining. And Eric Elmosnino’s show-stopping doesn’t hurt either. Elmosnino does for Gainsbourg’s cool nonchalance what Marion Cotilard did for Edith Piaf’s tyrannical willfulness. At the end of the day, this love song to Gainsbourg is a daring feat and original testament to a true original, a man of whom French ex-President Franí§ois said: He was our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire… He elevated the song to the level of art.
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life opens in New York on August 31 and Los Angeles on September 2.