‘I’ve come to piss you off’: Deceased Artiste Bertrand Blier (Part 2 of two)

"My name is Bertie Blye.

"No, I’ve never stolen a car, or gone to prison, or abused Isabelle Huppert on the side of a road. 

"And yet I am the immortal author of Les Valseuses.

"I was born March 4, 1939, a good year, at Boulogne-Billancourt.

"My father was a good actor.

"Yes, he had an influence over me. As much as Boris Vian, James Cain, and Thelonious Monk.

"I am an old young director full of promise (Hitler, connais pas!).

"Sadly, I didn’t keep that promise (Calmos).

"And then, thanks to a group of friends and the flip of a wrist, I managed to pull myself together (Buffet Froid).

"You see how I can look at my work in a lucid way.

"If you ask me who are the best moviegoers in the world, I will tell you the Americans, because of a pretty little statue that sits in my library and that I caress once a day with a trembling hand. (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs)

"As to why my hand is trembling, I will let you guess. Sometimes it’s emotion.

"I am also the director of a film titled Beau-Père, the star of which has given us the slip. 

"The cinema is much more important than politics, believe me.” [Self-written bio, found on p. 160 in Blier, Pensées et répliques]

I ended the first part of this piece with a discussion of Too Beautiful for You (1989), which was a turning point in Blier’s work, as it saw him departing from the world he had depicted from the mid-Seventies on, in which he limned (and made fun of) sexist men and numb women, as well as curious ciphers who inhabited an absurdist universe. 

But just because his female characters became three-dimensional and one could feel genuine sympathy for them didn’t mean that Blier was abandoning his characteristic Theatre of the Absurd-ish situations and bizarre juxtapositions. He proved that brilliantly in the trio of films he made with actress Anouk Grinberg, who was his companion for most of the Nineties and the muse for his first films devoted to female protagonists.

Ad for the English translation of the novel
Going Places.

First, a word about his approach to filmmaking. One of the reasons I did 14 episodes about his films on the Funhouse TV show from the fall of 2021 to the spring of 2022 is that his work adhered to both the “high” and “low” sides of the material I cover. At first glance his films were sexual and appealed to the vulgar side of French farce; once one watches more than a few minutes of any of his films, though, it’s evident that a master storyteller was at work, who wanted to depict characters in certain situations, but never offered the easy (idiotic) answers you’d find in a simple sex farce.

He stated his goal in a 1988 quote: “From the beginning I try to identify strategies that will let me take the viewer by surprise. I’m particularly fond of using cliches and classic dramatic forms as my starting point. Then I completely reverse them. It upsets the emotional balance, shatters the cocoon of intellectual comfort in which spectators have hoped to bury themselves.” [1988 quote, cited in Harris, p. 20]

Blier and his wife,
actress Farida Rahouadj

Thus, the illogical universe that his characters inhabit may seem to indicate that the film is going out of control, but that universe is actually a careful construct through which Blier is up-ending any number of dramatic cliches. And there are no better examples of this than the first two films he made with Grinberg.

Sadly, though, U.S. distribution of foreign films got weaker in the Eighties and by the Nineties it reached new lows. Thus, of the eight films I about to discuss here — of which at least four are classic Blier, up there with his Seventies/Eighties best — only one (!) had U.S. theatrical distribution and two had DVD releases (with one other being released only on VHS).

Thus, some of Blier’s best work has never been seen by American cinephiles. And thus the image of him as a “misogynist” filmmaker was made even greater, as very few American viewers have seen the mature Blier. (His age when making these last eight films spans from 52 to 80!)

One of the great examples of this mature approach was his first female-centric film, Merci La Vie (1991). He said about the picture and its follow-up Un deux trois soleil, “I’ve begun my second career. I’ve invested more of myself in these last two films.” [1993 quote, cited in Harris, p. 130]

Merci is one of Blier’s greatest achievements, in that it does open up a new period in his work while also visually “quoting” his earlier works. It also is one of his most extreme experiments with temporal and spatial displacement, as we jump backwards and forwards in time and in and out of fiction. These “jumps” are indicated to the viewer via a series of differently colored sequences, as the film is in color, b&w, and monochrome depending on the environment or time period that we’re in. 

This sounds like it could be quite confusing, but Blier makes it easier to follow by giving us two lead characters who become the female equivalents of the two antiheroes in Les Valseuses (1974). In that case both of the men were charming but dumb; here the women are smarter, as Joëlle is a troublemaker (Anouk Grinberg) and the other, Camille (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is a younger student who is the more logical and less impetuous of the two. We follow them from adventure to adventure and eventually get to know them quite well.

The film’s time periods come about as a result of Camille studying for her finals about the subject of WWII and the fact that a film is being made about WWII that the two women wander into (and Joëlle becomes the star of). But is it really a film, or is it actually a different life for Joëlle, who apparently underwent a medical experiment without her knowledge: she was given a venereal disease by a crafty doctor (Depardieu) who wants to see its effects on the local male population. 

Again, when recounted in print, the plot doesn’t make much sense, but Blier was indeed a master of absurdism and so there is an inherent logic to the illogic we see. What is going on is that Blier is not only showing his two female leads bonding and protecting each other from harm; he is also making a subtle and stinging commentary on the then-current AIDS crisis, likening it to the Holocaust.

Blier addressed the changes in time and space by noting that Merci was “a channel-hopper’s film. That’s what it’s about. You zap, and suddenly it’s in black and white, it’s a war film…. Kids are great at it, they can even put on a cassette and call someone at the same time. It’s like gymnastics for viewers….” [1991 quote, cited in Harris on pp. 134-35.]

The thing that makes the film so special, though, is not the flow of events the women move though, but the fact that they are emotionally appealing characters. Camille cares much about her father (as Charlotte did with Serge Gainsbourg in real life) and Joëlle confesses her fear of dying young from the disease she’s been poisoned with. Merci is in fact such a special creation because of this counterpoint between an utterly absurd sequence of events and two deeply felt (and extremely well acted) lead characters.

The film is compelling from its opening image: Joëlle being smacked and left behind on a road in a wedding gown by her boyfriend, who drives away. Camille finds her and puts her in a shopping cart (a blatant reference to the opening of Les Valseuses) and tries to protect her throughout the rest of the film. (This is reinforced by the women’s height differential — Camille is taller and also has more common sense than Joëlle, so she comes off as an “older sister,” despite being years younger.)

The self-referential aspect seen in earlier Blier films reaches full flower here. The characters make references to the soundtrack music and the fact that they are in flashbacks. One particularly bizarre moment in the WWII plot finds Camille saying she might die, and her father (played as a younger man by Michel Blanc) notes that she can’t die, she hasn’t been born yet.

Then, in the weirdest twist, Depardieu’s doctor character urges the father to use a condom if he has sex with Joëlle. To which the father responds with a shout (after the characters have been nearly bombed by the Germans), “What period are we in, anyway? If there’s AIDS, there’s no Boches [Germans]. If there’s Boches, there’s no AIDS, and we can screw!”

Thus, Merci is not just a transitional work by Blier but an exceptionally weird and funny comedy with an undertone of longing for the past and sadness for the victims of both 20th-century nightmares. Camille’s love of her dad eventually comes to mirror Bertrand’s feelings for his father Bernard (who died shortly before he made the film); her father (as an old man, played by Jean Carmet) gives her a speech about being typecast in the acting profession and wishing he had been a “great actor.” “The plot never revolves around me… the best I can hope for now is to die playing a small part.” Clearly, this speech was built out of things that Bernard Blier said to his son as he got older.

Hopefully, someday Merci will get the cult it so richly deserves. It was hated by the critics in France, but it never even received U.S. theatrical distribution and was never released on any home-entertainment format. 

The next film continued Blier’s maturation as a filmmaker. Un deux trois soleil (aka One, two, three, freeze, 1993) received no distribution but thankfully did have a DVD release for a short time. At points he identified the film as “the most personal” of all his works. This is a fascinating statement, given that the film presents the life of a young woman, as we witness her moving through moments of her childhood, teenage years, and adulthood all in the same spaces (a housing project in Marseilles). 

As in Merci, Anouk Grinberg gives a terrific performance here, incarnating the heroine at different ages, with the jumps in time occurring suddenly. Her character is wistful, as she struggles with her overbearing mother (Myriam Boyer, Serie noire), memories of a boyfriend (Olivier Martinez) who died as a teenager, and pleading with her alcoholic father (Marcello Mastroianni) to give up booze. 

The above might indicate that the film is a melodrama; it is not. There are many great comedic moments, all of them utterly absurd, and a few of the plot threads weave in an element that was new to Blier’s work, namely magical realism. Her boyfriend is labelled as dead from the first, but during the events of the film her parents both die and reappear to her, driving her as nuts in their post-death incarnations as they did in life.

Blier spoke about the new approach seen in this film: “After a dozen years, I have the impression of being able to make dense and develop themes in a very personal way, freed from the classic structure of the first films.” [Predal, jeune cinema] 

In addition to the comedy there are genuinely moving moments, many of which have to do with the father character. Blier was clearly still haunted by his father’s death, and so he created an Italian father to stand in for his French father, who was an Italo-phile. Mastroianni is absolutely perfect in the role (again showing that, as an actor, he got better and better throughout his career), as his character is to be seen as both a drunken sot (who keeps wandering into the wrong apartments in the housing complex, mistaking Black families for his own) and a man who longs terribly to go back to Italy. 

One of the images that sums up the film best concerns the father: He is pranked by two teens from the apartment complex who keep appearing in his path carrying around a door for him to go through, with his correct apartment number on it. The final use of this door is absolutely moving and truly is one of the most unabashedly and beautifully sentimental moments in Blier’s cinema.

The film never was distributed in the U.S. (It did play at MoMA, where I saw Blier and Grinberg do an introduction.) Thus, there was no recognition in America of Blier’s stepping away from the more controversial “vulgar” themes found in some of his Seventies and Eighties work. What was noted by foreign critics who did see the film, though, was that Blier was finally including Black characters in his film and in Soleil is openly commenting on the manner in which poor families are huddled together in housing projects. (Though he does show the family units to be quite solid and nurturing — something Grinberg’s character has never had, thus a Black woman who becomes her surrogate mother.)

The critics clearly had misinterpreted Blier’s messages about society — his depictions of sexist characters found him branded Right-wing, but he was personally Left-leaning. When asked about it, he said,“... I believe that my films — me, perhaps not, but them, yes — are left-wing. Apart from Too Beautiful for You, where they are gentrified, all my heroes are from the wrong side of the street: thugs, lost people….” [Murat, Telerama]

Like Merci, Soleil deserves an audience. One can only hope that a programmer (or perhaps a prone-to-homages filmmaker like Wes Anderson) will move it out of the shadows and it will finally be seen as one of Blier’s best, most layered works. 

Blier’s last film starring Anouk Grinberg was Mon Homme (aka My Man, 1996). This film did get a distribution deal in the U.S. and appeared on VHS (via Artificial Eye and New Yorker). It is an excellent comedy but isn’t as groundbreaking as its predecessors. 

Here we find Grinberg playing a hooker who takes her work seriously (with one of her johns being played by New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud!) and who decides to take a big, bizarre step when she takes pity on a homeless man (Gérard Lanvin) and then makes him her pimp. He stays in that role, collecting her money, but then cheats on her with a woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who doesn’t want to be a hooker, so he keeps seeing her (and spending money on her) as a mistress. 

Blier had an interesting reaction to Mon Homme in later years. He said, “Mon Homme, this is my hardest film. The hardest. I don't claim it too much. There are times when we go too far... and there, I went there! I don't claim all my films, you know. Not Calmos, nor Mon Homme, nor My Friend's Girl. But I like Merci la vie and Un deux trois soleil….” [Murat, Telerama]

The film may have been a difficult one for Blier in terms of his scripting or perhaps his relationship with his star (this was their last film together). But it is a perfectly entertaining dark comedy that has some sexy moments and continues Blier’s run of films with complex female characters.

And it does boast one of the most interesting juxtapositions of music in any modern film. On its soundtrack can be heard the emotional, religious compositions of Henryk Gorecki and the sensual, earthy songs of Mr. Barry White. 

With the turning of the century Blier’s films disappeared from America’s movie screens entirely (although one of the films did get a brief DVD release; see below). The first movie in the run of five movies that went under the radar over here was Les Acteurs (aka Actors, 2000). The film circulated among English-speaking collectors as a bootleg from a subtitled version that aired on the SBS Channel in Australia.

Acteurs is Blier returning whole-heartedly to Theater of the Absurd comedy, with a who’s who of French actors “of a certain age” musing about their lives and careers, and the fact that they’re getting fewer roles as they grow older. We follow an initial group of them (André Dussollier, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Jacques Villeret) who find themselves in a restaurant, unsure of their lines. The initial group then wanders (in classic Blier style) through Paris, meeting different colleagues as they move on. 

The line-up of familiar faces is incredible, with Blier focusing most attention on the character people and a few superstars showing up in different guises: Depardieu crashes his motorcycle into a billboard near the group; Belmondo is a homeless version of himself (who gets a great death scene as jazz appears on the soundtrack); and Delon is shooting some kind of thriller (and says about himself “I’m a silent sort of guy, with a silent sort of face...”), but then points out the empty chairs on set (“you should always have a chair for a friend who may drop in, a chair with his name...”) emblazoned with the names of two great dead French stars (Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura). He then names others who need chairs (Bourvil, Louis de Funes, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand).

One of the more surprising scenes for fans of French film who may not have been following the private lives of the stars involves Jean-Claude Brialy, a great star of the Sixties and Seventies. Brialy had come out as gay in his later life and allowed Blier to write a humorous scene related to this fact — but in the scene Brialy retains his dignity and reminds the other actor about Brialy’s place in cinema as a star in the films of the French New Wave.

Blier did also include two women in the parade of performers: Josiane Balasko (who claims to be André Dussollier) and Maria Schneider, whom he gifted with a nice monologue. At its end, she says, “I’m Maria Schneider. This scene has been good for me.” 

Blier and only *some* of his actor friends.

He referred to his cast in an interview as “an entire orchestra” and talked about how he conceived of the film (and its eventual failure at the box office): “...there, it was the public who did not want to get involved in the game, in this series of jokes and pleasantries in which the actors participated cheerfully. 

“I wrote with the phone next to me, and as soon as I came up with a scene for an actor, I called him. Each time, I gave that actor the names of those who had already accepted before him, and in that fashion I finally got everyone, with a snowball effect. The problem is that there should have been others, but the budget suffered drastic cuts, which forced me to reduce my ambitions, and I had to give up scenes involving younger actors. But the scenario was shot exactly as it was written.” [Predal, jeune cinema]

One watches the film wondering what set it in motion for Blier. That is revealed in the very last scene, in which the actor Claude Brasseur acts out a scene with a gun in a rainstorm. He is interrupted when he receives a cellphone call, which turns out to be from his dead dad, the great French actor Pierre Brasseur (Children of Paradise). Blier is revealed to be the director of the film; he and the crew watch Claude talk to his father. Claude soon turns back to Bertrand, saying his father is “with a pal who’d like to talk to you.” 

Bertrand takes the cellphone and begins a conversation with his father Bernard. He makes small talk and explains the film he’s making is about actors. He then responds to an unheard question, “Of course I think about you. Every day. In fact, as time goes on, I miss you even more.” [cut to credits]

This finale is about as personal as Blier’s art ever got. No more “stand-in” characters for his father, just Bertrand lamenting his death on film, at the end of his own meditation about older actors who are getting fewer lines, less calls with work, and have no idea which way to go with their lives. And, again, I note this is a thoroughly enjoyable and moving work that was never, ever seen by American viewers. 

The next film by Blier is probably my least favorite, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just that the first half or so is directly adapted from a play that Blier wrote, which reportedly ran for two years in Paris. And, surprisingly, given that many of his films contain scenes (or entire portions of the film) that could be called “stagey” (read: two-character scenes in confined environments), Les Côtelettes (aka The cutlets, 2003), which was actually a play, comes off as a more “limited” offering, although the second half in which the film opens up is a lot more engaging.

The plot revolves around two pompous older men (Philippe Noiret and Michel Bouquet) who both fall in love with the same woman — namely the woman (Farida Rahouadj, Blier’s last wife) who works as a maid for one of them. Bouquet visits Noiret at the very beginning and notes he’s there specifically “to piss you off” (a classic Blier line). Soon, the men become embroiled in the triangle, which one can easily see as a kind of allegory for colonialism.

The film moves back to the world of Seventies Blier when the character of “Death,” depicted as an older woman (Catherine Hiegel), appears and says she is going to claim the maid. The two men end up attempting to stave the Grim Reaper off by screwing her in the hospital where their beloved is slowly dying – until there’s a musical number and the whole film goes wildly out of control. (And this time the out-of-control sequence is well-designed and performed, unlike the bizarre end of Calmos in which our antiheroes end up in a rather cheap-looking simulation of a vagina.) 

The “second career” of Blier reached a latter-day high point with the funny and characteristically bizarre How Much Do You Love Me? (2005), which was out briefly on DVD from Strand (with no theatrical release in the U.S. beforehand). The film is a densely plotted farce, which, again, is as good as anything Blier made in the Seventies and Eighties but was barely seen by American viewers.

Its initial premise is that a schnook (Bernard Campan) gets a beautiful hooker (Monica Bellucci) to live with him by convincing her that he is a lottery winner. The schnook is revealed to have a heart condition by his doctor friend (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who warns the hooker that she might kill him with vigorous sex. The hooker eventually disappears, and the schnook learns that she is the wife of a gangster (Depardieu), who offers to let the schnook have her for a certain sum of money (equal to his lottery winnings). That’s when it comes out that our antihero was lying and that he never won the lottery, and complications pile up. 

How Much is a beautifully stylized comedy with urban late-night landscapes, beautiful camera movement, and eye-catching set design. It shows just how vibrant and amusing Blier’s scripting can be and contains two scene-stealing moments, from doctor Darroussin, who delivers a touching monologue about a nurse he one loved, and neighbor Farida Rahouadj, who instructs the schnook and the hooker in how truly great sex should sound.

It also contains one of those memorably un-p.c. lines that made critics who gave only a cursory glance to his films the notion that he was a misogynist. The line in question? “Asses are meant to be touched. This is France!”

The last Blier masterwork is Le bruit des glaçons (aka The Clink of Ice, 2010). It’s not at all subtle but is wonderfully scripted and presents us with an absurdist scenario that is both very funny and quite moving at points. 

In an interview Blier spoke very eloquently about it. He called it “...my purest film. It's probably due to my age, to maturity. And more than the cancer plotline, it was for the love scenes between Anne Alvaro and Jean Dujardin that I shot the film…. When you have an incurable brain tumor, the fulfillment of the life you have left passes by necessity through the arms of a woman. We are looking for the one who will close your eyes, and it is not always the one we expect who does it.” [Murat, Telerama] 

The plot is beautifully fashioned. It concerns an alcoholic author (Jean Dujardin, The Artist and the brilliant, unseen-in-the-U.S. J’Accuse by Polanski) who receives a visit one day from a gentleman (Albert Dupontel) who claims that the author is dying and that he is the author’s cancer. The author’s Russian mistress can’t see his cancer and neither can his devoted maid (Anna Alvaro, Danton).

As the film moves on, the author argues with his cancer (in the classic manner of Blier’s comedy team leads) and eventually falls in love with the only one who truly cares about him, the maid. However, the maid has received a caller as well — a woman (Myriam Boyer) who claims that she is her cancer. She is not as well dressed and articulate as the author’s cancer, but that is because she represents “the cancer of the employed,” not the “cancer of the bosses.”

The film grows in bizarre activity until a scene in which the lives of author and the maid are threatened by crooks who break into the house, and thus comes a surprisingly upbeat ending. At that point we hear the stirring and beautiful rendition of Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” by Nina Simone; other music heard in the film is composed by Ravel, Handel, Schumann, Leonard Cohen, and Felix Leclerc (a terrific song by a singer-songwriter unknown in the U.S.).

Dujardin and Dupontel are great as the lead male characters, but Alvaro truly shines as the maid. She won a Cesar for her performance. 

The Maid (Anna Alvaro) and her "cancer"
(Myriam Boyer).

Glaçons returned to one of Blier’s favorite techniques, direct address to the viewer. He noted that “…in silent cinema, Chaplin did it. And if Chaplin did it, why not me?… In Le bruit des glaçons, it seemed essential to me. All the characters contemplate their death. Except cancer, who doesn't need to...”

And while Glaçons is Blier’s last masterwork, his final film, Convoi exceptionnel (aka Heavy Duty) (2019) is an enjoyable farce that returns to elements contained in his previous films. First of all is a shopping cart: Les Valseuses began with Depardieu in a shopping cart being pushed by Dewaere; in the opening of Merci La Vie Charlotte Gainsbourg pushes Anouk Grinberg in a shopping cart after she finds her unconscious by the side of a road; Convoi begins with Depardieu as a homeless man pushing a shopping cart with his possessions in it.

Note the shopping cart. (A symbol of Blier's
"wandering" characters.)

There are twists and turns in the plot, most of them heavy on the meta side. The film begins with homeless Depardieu meeting a wealthy-looking man (Christian Clavier) on the street. The wealthy man tells Gerard that they must hurry, as they have to kill a man. Why? “It’s in the script,” says Clavier, beginning a thread that runs throughout most of the film. 

Clavier is aware they’re operating from a script whereas Depardieu isn’t, until he is told. Then a further complication: new pages of the script are appearing with alarming frequency and neither man knows what he’s supposed to be doing. They wind up confronting the writers in their office and we learn then that what they’re involved in is seemingly a TV series (as the woman in charge is called a “show runner”). 

By this point Blier aficionados will recognize that the filmmaker is quoting his own work, as he was wont to do over the years. The notion of older men “losing their lines” and thus their direction in life appeared in Actors, and the inevitable obligatory killing hails from Buffet Froid.

As the rest of the film unfolds, we see the plot being constructed in front of us. First, there’s a woman (Farida Rahouadj) they meet who tells a sad story about her childhood, proving that, while these people might just be characters in a drama of some kind, they do have specific memories. 

Depardieu and Clavier then realize they have to kill Rahouadj, but once they do, the entire movie shifts gears — Depardieu’s long-lost girlfriend shows up and Clavier is left by his wife. The final movement of the film finds the two men’s lives completely flipped: Now Clavier is homeless and Depardieu is rich, living off the wealth of his 90-year-old wife.

Toward the end of the film the two leads talk a lot about food and how it should be prepared. One wonders why this discussion is so long, but by this time it was very clear that one of Depardieu’s main real-life addictions is food, so one gets the impression he didn’t actually need Blier’s lines to keep the scene going for as long as it does. It in fact serves another purpose, preparing us for a very sudden punchline to the film. 

The finale of Convoi might be sudden and perhaps not the “final statement” that one would’ve wished for from Blier, but early on he gives us another one of his flawless discussions, this time about art and death. 

In the latter half of the film, Depardieu and his girlfriend encounter a homeless man who turns out to be a film producer whose films all failed. He asks Depardieu if he knows “the difference between life and the movies.” He explains, “In life you die. In the movies, you never die. Never. For example, Mastroianni will never die.” 

Convoi may not be one of the “great last films” of a great filmmaker, but it does entertain and it places Blier’s absurdist universe into the current moment. And no, neither he nor his characters will ever really die. 

*****

Note: Thanks to friends Paul Gallagher and M. Faust for copies of the films. Thanks also to J-M Gregoire for references and translation, and Leonard Stoehr for inspiration.

Bibliography:
Blier, Bertrand, Going Places, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1974
Blier Bertrand, Pensées et répliques, le cherche midi, 2001, 2015
Harris, Sue, Bertrand Blier, Manchester University Press, 2001
Murat, Pierre, “Bertrand Blier en 2010 dans “Télérama” : “Pour moi, il n’y a plus de cinéma.” Telerama.
Predal, Rene, “Rencontre avec Bertrand Blier.” jeune cinéma, n°281, avril 2003

Proud to be a muse, talented in her own right: Deceased Artiste Jane Birkin

There is no way I could let the passing of Jane Birkin go by without doing at least a modest tribute to her on this blog. I was lucky enough to conduct an interview with her way (way) back in 2003 when she was in NYC to present her show “Arabesque” — consisting of songs by Gainsbourg with an Arabic backing band at the Alliance Francaise.

This clip, which is quite short, is one of the most popular interview clips I’ve posted on that site – you know the one, the one that doesn’t really approve of “fair use” and has a myriad of rules to keep those who uphold that practice from posting their work. In any case, this is a short little snippet, but that’s what I used to post up there.

 

Recently, when “Uncle Jean” (aka Jean-Luc Godard) left us, I went back to the Birkin interview to excerpt her discussion of working with him on Soigne ta droite (1987).

 

*****

Because of her public persona as Gainsbourg's muse (in my talk with her she proclaimed her pride at having inspired and been given the songs by Serge), it was not noted enough by critics that she kept getting better and better as an actress. She’s charming as hell in some of her early “dollybird” incarnations, and her beauty is one of the only reasons to watch some of the films she made with Gainsbourg (unless Serge did the score, which gave you two reasons to see the film).

But, as time went on, she began appearing in more demanding roles and, once her relationship with Jacques Doillon had ended, she did indeed become a regularly busy actress who provided particularly wonderful turns in ensemble pieces (as in the two Poirot-by-Ustinov films she’s in) and the work of other New Wave directors, including Resnais, but most especially Rivette. (For whom she starred in Around a Small Mountain, his last film, a “small movie” extraordinaire concerning a very charming middle-aged romance.)

For we American fans, the documentary Jane by Charlotte (2021), made by Charlotte Gainsbourg in an effort to understand and relate to her mother, gave us a portrait of Jane that was very much down to earth. She may have been a music, movie, and fashion icon, but she was also a somewhat emotionally distant mother, who, it was revealed in the film, was having health problems.

In the film, which lacked a narration by Charlotte and was more of a fly-on-the-wall view of the family (thus requiring that you already knew who Jane, Charlotte, Lou, Kate, Serge, and others were), Jane having a bout with cancer is mentioned in the past tense. In her obits it was noted  that she had a stroke in 2021 and had cancelled various commitments in early 2023 because of a broken ankle and a break in her shoulder.

Then she cancelled an appearance at Town Hall in NYC in the summer of last year, having all the tickets refunded, which seemed to indicate something grievous had occurred. No more was heard until the death announcements started appearing online the Sunday before last.

*****

As a tribute I offer the following video clips, which relate entirely to her music career. Appraisals of her acting career are best saved for another time, as a number of her French films never appeared on these shores with English subs.

While her “Symphonique” stage show found her singing only the songs that Serge wrote directly for her (with the orchestra playing Serge’s most familiar songs with Jane offstage), it’s interesting to see that she was on French TV in April of 2021 looking in fine form, performing a Gainsbourg medley of his more, let us say, “familiar” songs.

She was seen in March of 2022 on an interview show discussing her concert performances, her “sketch” film with Agnes Varda (not a great picture — each time I see it, I want to love it, but it seems like more of a not-that-good TV comedy show transposed to film), and the documentary by Charlotte. She looks a bit bigger in this clip but is in good spirits and seems to be in good health.

And here she is on Feb 1 of this year, participating in a protest supporting the people of Myanmar. Her commitment to various causes was the least-seen but most important part of her public appearances:

 

Many of the TV appearances Jane made with Serge have become available on DVDs and on fan-generated “mail order” discs. This one, featuring him lip-synching to two songs from the classic Melody Nelson album while he carries Jane on his back, is one of the more playful clips that hasn’t surfaced on a compilation (yet).

Serge composed songs for seven of her solo albums (not counting songs for films and random unreleased tracks). The songs ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. One of the latter is “Di-doo-dah,” heard here with Jane singing it live on the Russell Harty show in 1973. 

Another minor (but catchy) song for Jane by Serge was “Ex-fan des sixties,” wherein the decade’s biggest heroes (either dead or having broken up their band) are recited in a laundry-list fashion. It’s not a major Gainsbourg song, but it’s interesting, as it acknowledges what an incredible impact the pop and rock of the Sixties had on France. (All the artists mentioned are either American or British).

 

Moving from the ridiculous back to the sublime, here is one of the songs that Serge entrusted to Jane that is considered one of his best works which he never sang. It was recited by Catherine Deneuve at Serge’s funeral service and was always in Jane’s repertoire, if she was doing “both sides” of Serge.

The title, “Fuir le bonheur de peur qu'il ne se sauve,” translates loosely as “Fleeing happiness for fear it will run away.” A very helpful YouTube poster named Julia has subtitled the song in English but hasn’t made the video embed-dable for some inexplicable reason. (I always wonder why people make sure their vids are not to be embedded – will that negate the possible copyright claim? Those are either going to come or they’re not; adding the embed function serves to spread your work around more.) 

You can watch the subtitled version here. And here is the song in its “version originale” with Serge onscreen listening to Jane singing it.

Over the years, Jane sang with a number of other performers. Perhaps because her first song was a duet with a guy (“Je t’aime, moi non plus” with Serge), she continued to work very well with male partners. One personal favorite was Bryan Ferry (with whom she sang a Roxy classic). Also, in Bertrand Tavernier’s Daddy Nostalgie (1990), she duetted with Dirk Bogarde on the song “These Foolish Things,” which Ferry had brought back to life on his first solo LP in 1973.

“Je t’aime” was such a big hit in France and England that a follow-up was attempted twice: “69 Anee Erotique” and the “new dance” that Serge proposed (which, let’s face it, was not all that much more than syncopated groping) with this number.

 

Some fascinating footage appears here — Serge personally instructing Jane on how to sing one of his songs for her solo albums. (He definitely conceived of her “choir boy” voice as an instrument to be included in the orchestration of his songs.) Also, Jane talks in 1997 about his death and how he left her 25% ownership of the Melody Nelson album, in case “things went wrong” in her old age.

 

In 2003 when Jane was touring the world with her “Arabesque” show, featuring Gainsbourg songs with arrangements for Arabic instruments, she appeared on various programs in Europe to promote the shows she was doing. Here she performs Serge’s rousing “Elisa,” slowed down and made into a hypnotic ode.

 

Jane had another touring show after “Arabesque,” but her final major undertaking in terms of musical performance was a show called “Birkin Gainsbourg: The Symphonic” (which sounds much better in French as “Le Symphonique”). The show played here at Carnegie Hall on Feb. 1, 2018, and was an absolute delight. Only one guest star joined Jane onstage: Rupert Wainwright, who sang "Ces Petits Riens" and "La Chanson de Prevert." There is a video of Rufus joining Jane in a different venue here.

The whole "Symphonique" show (minus guest stars and from a different venue) was aired on French TV and can be seen here.

In Charlotte’s documentary about her mother, it is noted that the only time they sang together onstage was here in NYC at the Beacon Theater on March 6, 2020, a short time before the pandemic lockdowns began. A scan of YT reveals that, while the Beacon show might’ve been their only planned and rehearsed appearance together, they did sing onstage on another occasion. In 2013 a video was posted of them singing together at a concert in Monaco, duetting on Serge’s “La chanson de Prévert”:

 

Birkin stated in my interview with her that her first-ever performances in the U.S. were for the “Arabesque” tour in 2003, and thus her first-ever NYC performances were the two times she performed that show at the Alliance Francaise. (I saw the second of those two shows and it was wonderful.)

Her last performance in NYC was most definitely the Beacon Theater show, as a show that was to take place on my birthday (June 18) was announced for last year (2022) at Town Hall and was cancelled very quickly without explanation. (The mention of cancer in Charlotte’s documentary and the stroke she suffered in September 2021 were alerts that she perhaps was having health problems.)

Oddly enough, the first hit you get on Google when searching to find when it was that Jane played her last concert is the thoroughly unreliable Concert Archives site, which lists the cancelled June 18, 2022 gig as if it actually took place. One wonders how many other cancelled performances are on the pages of this website….

In any case, the reason to re-see the Symphonique show at the Beacon was that, this around, Jane had invited guest stars to join her onstage. So I attended the show and was very glad to see Jane duetting with both Iggy Pop (!) and Charlotte G. 

Jane chose to sing “Ballade de Johnny-Jane,” from the soundtrack of Serge’s film Je t’aime, moi non plus (1976), with Charlotte. This was an interesting choice, as it first appeared on the soundtrack to the film and is an odd song that refers to the film in its lyrics. 

It also, oddly enough, was a song that Jane duetted on with Vanessa Paradis. The latter is a surprise, since Vanessa had Serge write the lyrics for her second album about a year before his death. She was the only artist who requested he do rewrites on some of the lyrics, and he wound up wisecracking, “Paradis, c’est l’enfer” (“Paradis, it was hell”). Here are Jane and Vanessa singing “Johnny-Jane.”

And here is some lovely YT poster’s very good recording of mother and daughter singing father’s movie theme song:

 

Now further down the rabbit hole, we can thank YT poster “secularus” for posting not only the preceding video, but also videos of the two songs that Jane did with Iggy at the Beacon. 

The first was “Elisa,” which they had also done the preceding evening on “The Tonight Show” with that grinning, chuckling idiot as host. The “Tonight Show” people made sure that there is no post of that performance on YT. All the better to watch this dynamic duo perform it onstage:

 

Iggy first tackled Gainsbourg’s lyrics with a tuneful cover of “La Javanaise” in 2012 (on his album Apres). Far closer to the spirit of his own songs is Serge’s “Requiem pour un con,” which taunts the listener and calls them an “ass” (or twat, in one online translation that I think is a bit too loose and a bit too British). Here Iggy does the song with Jane:

The song that Jane ended all of her Gainsbourg shows with was the aforementioned “La Javanaise.” It was written by Serge for Juliette Greco, who had the initial hit with it. Serge also recorded it himself and sang it in some of his live shows, later in his career.

Jane’s performances of it were always especially moving, as her voice cracked throughout it, and it always seemed like the song’s simplicity made it the perfect way to end a tribute to Serge. Especially because this most romantic of tunes, set in a waltz tempo, actually says that the couple dancing will be in love “for the length of a song.”

In one particular rendition she did on a Gainsbourg tribute on French TV, the audience sang the song along with her, which made it perhaps the most stirring tribute to Serge ever (with the French public so familiar with his signature song that they took over from the onstage singer). That version doesn’t appear to be on YT (or is tucked away somewhere), so I’ll end with a different version, in which Jane sings the whole song alone.

This is from a charity benefit show she participated in back in 2017. She is wearing sneakers and an old-looking pullover, and is sporting a cast on her left arm. This makes the performance even more endearing, as if she was going to keep singing Serge’s music no matter what happened to her health-wise. And she did, for which we can only be intensely grateful.

Note: Thanks to Despina Veneti her excellent sampling of Jane B. photos.

Tell us a story: Lars von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac'

Sex is the ultimate red herring in Lars von Trier’s masterfully cruel and compassionate Nymphomaniac, which is now available for “complete” viewing (read: the second half, dubbed Volume Two, is now in release). The real subjects of the film are depression and storytelling. The first informs the sequences in which our heroine Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is degrading herself in the pursuit of release; the second is reflected in the film’s “Scheherazade” structure, in which said heroine recounts her life story to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), a sympathetic, know-it-all Swede.

Although many pieces written about the film have, naturally enough, focused on the sex sequences, the storytelling frame device is key to understanding and enjoying the film (yes, the latter is possible), as they are reflections of von Trier’s pitch-black humor and his literary (modernist literary, that is) approach to telling a tale. The grimness of Joe’s story is counterpointed by the fact that her audience keeps interrupting (“this was one of your weakest digressions,” she informs him at one point) and that she is an entirely unreliable narrator.

This last notion, that of the “unreliable narrator,” is a cornerstone of Nymphomaniac that leavens the film and allow us to gain some distance from the severity of the sex sequences, many of which are moments of self-destruction rather than fulfillment. Normally we accept stories told in a film as being “true” (willing suspension of disbelief and all that) — here, in Volume One, Joe is interrupted at one key point by Seligman, who notes that there is a ridiculous coincidence in her story — thus causing us to wonder if she’s been embellishing, or if her tale is mostly fantasy.

The uncertainty that arises from the storytelling sequences make the film’s “extreme” moments even more effective, since we realize that the crazier the event, the more possible it is that Joe is making it all up. The two best examples of this are perhaps the most extreme sequences in the film, a humorous set-piece and Joe's most severe S&M moment.

The most humorous sequence – besides an amusing piece of physical comedy inspired by an old Harpo Marx routine – is the sequence where Joe and her married bedmate “Mr. H” are confronted by “Mrs. H” (Uma Thurman), a vengeful and oh-so-melodramatic wife. The sequence is beautifully played by Thurman, whose character says she doesn't want to cause any trouble, but that's exactly what she proceeds to do – humiliating her husband by dragging the children in to react to the fact that Daddy's leaving them, and assuring her husband and Joe (who does not want to become emotionally involved with H) that she will be just fine now that her husband has deserted her.

von Trier's critics accuse him of being “pretentious” because he often deals with angst and utilizes a bleak but exquisite visual style inspired by Tarkovsky (who is thanked in the credits here). These critics are mostly uncomfortable with von Trier's laser-like focus on the sort of odd behavior that depression provokes; what they overlook (or, more accurately, ignore) is the big amount of humor that appears in his films.

It thus makes perfect sense for the “Mrs. H” sequence to appear in a seemingly “bleak” film like Nymphomaniac because von Trier has been honing his dark, odd sense of humor since his breakout feature The Element of Crime (1984) and his superbly absurd horror TV miniseries The Kingdom (1994).

He has only made one film that is an out-and-out comedy (The Boss of It All, 2006), but his most peculiar film, the Dogma-inspired The Idiots (1998), contains a good deal of awkwardly humorous moments. Melancholia (2011) remains one of his most effective works because he brings the viewer into the world of Dunst and Gainsbourg's characters with the broad comedy contained in the first half of the film.

*****

In Nymphomaniac, Joe's sex addiction is so obsessive and self-destructive that von Trier clearly wanted us to both feel for her and to move outside her dilemma to see how truly bizarre her life has become – this is stretched in the film's final “act,” in which she becomes a story-telling debt collector for a wealthy criminal (Willem Dafoe). At that point the intensity of Gainsbourg's performance is what keeps the film from falling apart.

While the “Mrs H” sequence is one of the key moments in Volume One of the film, the most important moment in Volume Two is definitely the sequence where she is worked over by a violent gentleman (“K,” played by Jamie Bell) who conducts brutal sessions with submissive women.

Joe becomes addicted to the sessions and finally has her “ultimate” encounter with this gentleman when she is able to get herself off while he beats her (thus breaking his rule that sex should have no part in the sessions). The sequence is shot as a pretty standard moment of R-rated S&M, but, again, Gainsbourg's performance is so intense that we feel both her shame and humiliation, and the illicit turn-on she's getting from achieving something she has been formally “denied.”

The scene is without a doubt the most intense in the film, as it currently exists in its four-hour, two-part form (the “director's cut” running five-and-a-half hours will supposedly be released in the months to come). It successfully makes the viewer flinch, although Gainsbourg's narration and her release serve to remind us of the artifice that von Trier has introduced, the notion that this could merely be Joe's fantasy – the only thing that we know is absolutely true are the bruises on her face and body from a beating she suffered before Seligman found her in the courtyard adjacent to his apartment building.

Gainsbourg's thoroughly committed performance is indeed the glue that holds the film together. Like his heroes Bergman and Fassbinder, von Trier has given many of his lead actresses career-defining roles. Gainsbourg has gotten three such roles, all of which seem to be (if Charlotte's interviews are to be believed) manifestations of his own neurotic, anxious, depressed personality.

She is absolutely fearless in Nymphomaniac, imbuing Joe with an aching loneliness and a suicidal urge that makes her come to life. She's a person we can feel sympathy for, while we become increasingly disturbed by her extreme behavior. Gainsbourg's “posh” British accent makes Joe even more of an enigma – a woman with a ladylike demeanor and voice who wants men to hurt, fuck, and/or abuse her (with the exception of her true love, played by Shia LaBeouf). 

The film is not an “easy view,” but von Trier's work is always demanding and always worth the attention. Here he has assembled a terrific cast who lend dimension to their roles, whether briefly seen and vaguely scripted (Dafoe) or featured prominently but intended as a “reflection” of our lead character (Stacy Martin, who plays the “jail bait” Joe).

As for the scenes that are missing from the Volume One/Volume Two version: one can clearly see where a few of the edits were made. Sex scenes are about to occur and then don't, or conclude so quickly that one wonders why they are present at all (as with a scene where Joe has sex with two African men, which is led up to for several minutes and then ends summarily). 

What is particularly enjoyable about the “Volumes” version of the film is that editors Molly Marlene Stensgaard and Morten Hojbjerg chose to leave in most of Joe and Seligman's tangential conversations (about sin, anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism, PC language, and the double standard that rules women's sexuality), which don't “advance the plot” in any conventional way.

When one looks at the film's structure, though, it becomes apparent that these dialogues are the plot, just as much as any of Joe's memories. These tangents punctuate and sometimes blatantly interrupt her story, lending it balance and making Seligman a surrogate for the viewer. (How often have you seen a film where a character coincidentally bumps into the most important person in their life and wanted to note how truly unbelievable that is?)

It's hard to imagine what von Trier will do now that his “Charlotte trilogy” is over. One thing is certain: each of the films is a stylized masterwork that is both deeply disturbing and oddly, brazenly playful. In making the films, von Trier might have exposed much of his own darker side, but he has also provided Gainsbourg with the opportunity to show that she is one of the finest (and, again, most fearless) actresses around.
*****


The film's trailer, the one that is littered with review quotes on it. It's been considered “dirty” and has been labeled adult matter by YouTube (American companies pride themselves on their prudishness):

Lars hasn't been doing interviews for the film because of the “Nazi” problem at Cannes a few years back. Some of his older interviews are instructive, though, as is this one, where he talked about the film before he had shot it (audio only). He emphasizes that de Sade put a “lot of talk” in between his sex scenes:

Lars on battling depression:

Bonus clips: Lars in happier times, doing a music-video (!) for his film The Idiots.



A stunning little music-video made for The Kingdom in which Lars helps demonstrate the medical dance "The Shiver." If you think he's strange now, he was much stranger before:



Surely an odd cure for depression: the Rammstein song "Fuhre Mich," as heard in Nymphomaniac, Volume One: