Movie Review: Gainsbourg

A still from the film <i>Gainsbourg</i>. Photo / Supplied

Rating: 3/5
Verdict: Smoking, drinking, singing, sex - sometimes all at once.

If you think French pop music has all the astringency of creme de menthe, there's little in this biopic of one of the genre's great stars to change your mind. It takes its subject's genius as read - a safe approach in France where Gainsbourg was, in his lifetime, held in a stratospherically high esteem. Anglophone audiences, whose knowledge of the singer is limited to the lubricious, panting duet Je t'aime ... moi non plus that he did with Jane Birkin in 1969, may find it harder to comprehend the appeal.

That's because director Sfar, a graphic novelist making his film debut here, is not concerned to celebrate stardom but to explore the dark side of tormented genius. The film's full French title includes the words "a heroic life" and "a fairy tale" and it's hard to pick which, if either, of those phrases is intended ironically.

Certainly there's nothing heroic or fairytale about the finished film. At one point, Birkin (Gordon) calls him "connard", a rather disobliging word in French, and it's hard to disagree. The portrait that Sfar and his lead actor Elmosnino (an uncanny lookalike) create is of a man who might be most politely described as a self-centred jerk, a pastis-soaked solipsist wreathed in smoke and self-regard. His musical provocations, such as a reggae Marseillaise, seem here more self-indulgent than adventurous - though doubtless they were ground-breaking at the time.

True to his illustrator roots, Sfar (adapting his own graphic novel) adopts a bold, expressionist approach, including the use of a masked alter ego named "La Guele" (translated as "mug", meaning "face"), a grotesquely exaggerated version of Gainsbourg's own hook-nosed visage. This faintly menacing figure with elongated fingers stalks Gainsbourg throughout the movie, a visual manifestation of his darker desires and rampant id.

The jumpy, episodic approach can leave the viewer floundering at times as Gainsbourg cultivates, manipulates, beds, impregnates and betrays a succession of women, from established crooners to nubile popsters to legends (Casta's Brigitte Bardot is a cracker).

But as a man, Serge Gainsbourg remains obscure: his emotional instability is presented as a fact, though there is little in his past (a loving home life; Vichy-era persecution which he regarded as a game) to explain it. It's hard to shake the feeling that the film is, like so much French pop, oodles of style and little substance.

LOWDOWN

Cast: Eric Elmosnino, Anna Mouglalis, Sara Forestier, Laetitia Casta, Lucy Gordon
Director: Joann Sfar
Running time: 130 mins
Rating: M (sex scenes, offensive language) in French with English subtitles

-TimeOut