Any biopic on a singer whose most famous works include a song in which lyrics about going and coming between loins meld with recordings of orgasms, and a track with his 13-year-old daughter entitled ‘Lemon Incest’ is going to have a fair share of sex and music. And Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) is full of it. But to say that was the total scope of this film would be to sell it short. Very short. And to think that this film simply details the most well known events the career of Serge Gainsbourg would be wrong. Very wrong.
First-time filmmaker Joann Sfar has used his background as a graphic novelist and illustrator to create an inventive, fantastical representation of French chanson’s black sheep, partly from fact, partly from his own ideas of who and what the man born Lucien Ginsburg symbolises. For the jewish born director, Gainsbourg is a lover of some of 20th century French culture’s greatest female icons, a smoker of coronary baiting proportions, and a naturally gifted artist able to turn his hand to anything. Yet he is constantly battling insecurities about his Jewish appearance and feelings of being an outsider.
Sfar’s comic book mind has imagined Serge’s self-persecution complex about his jewishness and the more reckless side of his personality as being manifest in a seven-foot puppet-like caricature that appears during his weaker moments. This character brings to mind Pan from Pan’s Labyrinth not only because the same special effects created both creatures but because they are also both played by actor Doug Jones.
Sfar’s imaginative approach compares favourably to the two biggest films about french icons of recent years. Coco Avant Chanel was criticised in France for being a straightforward telling of the story of a woman who wasn’t the slightest bit straightforward. While La Vie en Rose although not following a linear structure seemed only to be made as such to set up the rather unimaginative final scene. Sfar has given Gainsbourg a linear structure but rather than forming it around the events that shaped the musician’s life, the film focuses on how the personality of the agent provocateur evolves (or not) to present the director’s subjective portrait of what Serge Gainsbourg is. As such, the spectator is thrown straight into the heart of the various phases of the singer’s life when his passions are burning on full flame, or about to become dying embers, rather than being shown how the these different periods began and finished. This means the film flows at a thrilling pace and never lets up, just like Serge himself. From the very start to the very end he remains the same. The man is shown as being formed from the boy: his love of the female form exists right from the very first scene of the film when, as a youngster, he asks a little girl to kiss him; but as a Jewish boy growing up in Nazi-occupied Paris he also first becomes aware of French anti-Semitism. Sfar has said that this is a film about a French hero, and unlike American heroes, French ones never learn. So Serge never grows up, and on a couple of emotive occasions in his adult life, the young Ginsburg is cut into the place of the elder Gainsbourg. The man forever remains the boy.
Most of all, Vie héroïque makes 60’s Paris look not just chic, but damn cool, mightily sexily, full of beautiful women, and a hell of a lot of fun to be Serge Gainsbourg at his height. The style is most definitely there. The film is oozing with it. But it is intelligently used as the foundations with which to present the substance of a character that is deserving of such a creative depiction.
