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.

The best Sixties musical you’ve never seen — and the best Anna Karina vehicle that *never* plays in the U.S.

Anna Karina, who recently died at 79, had a rich and vibrant career after her divorce from Jean-Luc Godard, but she will forever be best known as Uncle Jean’s first muse and a living embodiment of the Nouvelle Vague — of which only a scant few are left (namely Leaud and Belmondo; Bulle Ogier, Piccoli, and Trintignant deserve honorable mention). Her legacy of collaborations with Godard is strengthened by her later work with other great directors like Rivette, Michel Deville, Agnes Varda, Eric Rohmer, Roger Vadim, Visconti, Schlondorff, Tony Richardson, Cukor, Benoit Jacquot, Ulli Lommel, Jonathan Demme, Raoul Ruiz, and Funhouse deity Fassbinder (not forgetting Anna herself).

Pierre Koralnik, a specialist in telefilms and episodic TV, wouldn’t ever be placed in that company, but he made one of the single best Karina vehicles, the musical Anna (1967). The film’s charm and rewatchability comes not from Koralnik’s deft, professional touch with the material, but from its stars and a wonderfully memorable score by Serge Gainsbourg.

Anna was a telefilm that first aired on January 13, 1967. It was notable for being the first French telefilm in color and for being Gainsbourg’s only full score for a musical — he wrote dozens of instrumental and vocal scores for dramas and comedies, of course, and created two perfect concept albums (Histoire De Melody Nelson and L'Homme À Tête De Chou), but Anna was his only full-fledged musical.

The film’s international distribution remains a puzzle. It has never acquired a U.S. distributor and hasn’t played in NYC arthouses at all in the last quarter-century, since Gainsbourg became a cult figure in America. During which time, of course, the Godard films with Karina have been restored and revived countless times, in theaters and on home entertainment media.

I acquired a copy of the film from a Japanese home-entertainment release in 2002, and discussed and showed scenes from it on the Funhouse TV show at that time. I have since rerun those episodes twice and will be showing them again this weekend and next. (The show, for those who are unaware, is a non-profit enterprise that has aired for 26 years on Manhattan access and remains the premier American TV series covering both arthouse and grindhouse cinema.)

If American viewers have wanted to see the film, they have to acquire it from vendors selling overseas DVDs, or they can watch the musical numbers from the film on YouTube — without the fairy tale plot that comes between them, or the finale. In 2018, I was in Paris and was informed by a cineaste friend that it was “Anna’s year,” because three of her films were being restored and shown in cinemas again. These three were one of the Godard films (which we have never not had in the U.S.), the first feature she directed (Vivre ensemble, 1973), and Anna (which the Gilles Verlant bio of Gainsbourg notes was unseen in France from ’67 to 1990). Of those three, we proceeded to get more 4K restorations of the films she made with Godard — and nothing else.

So this piece serves as both a discussion of the film and a plea for some U.S. distributor to acquire it. (According to its IMDB listing, it has none at the moment and has never had one, thus accounting for it never being shown in U.S. rep houses, or even museums and non-profit spaces.) At some point in the future, it may appear on disc and some other writer will be asked to do the notes for the booklet contained in the release. For the time being, this piece will hopefully serve as that “101” for a film that Americans can’t see, unless they purchase it from overseas vendors (or hunt around on the underside of the Net, which benefits none of the French rights-holders).

The film was clearly inspired by the success of Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). It has a plot as flimsy as any great MGM musical and a look that is half-Demy, half-pop art.

The wafer-thin plot is a classic of convenient misunderstanding. An advertising man (Jean-Claude Brialy) who has a rich-kid, playboy lifestyle, searches Paris for a woman (Anna Karina) whose picture he took by accident at a photo shoot that was done at a train station. He doesn’t put 2 and 2 together and realize that the woman works in his own office, because she had dropped her glasses at the time the shutter was clicked and the pictures were taken. Upon such sweet misunderstandings great and timeless romances (and farces) are built and Anna is one of those, despite its utter invisibility in the U.S.

Karina is in full flower here. She is charming and resolute, and the bittersweet finale shows that her character is not made to simply melt into the scenery. She is a modern woman who, while pining for meaning in her life, doesn’t need or want the role of “dream girl” for a rich playboy. Although she is indeed a fantasy figure in certain scenes, most particularly in the oh, so Sixties dream sequences where she’s a sci-fi space traveler and a cowgirl gunfighter (!). (Part of a Fellini-esque dream seemingly added to stretch the film to 85 minutes; the sequence, which criticizes American militarism, overlaps with a later film that featured Serge in a supporting role, William Klein's Mister Freedom.)

Anna is both an object and a subject of passion in the film. Her specs-less image is put on posters throughout Paris by Brialy, and she becomes the subject of a glamorous “hunt.” On her own, though, she is a lonely soul, looking to take a vacation in a sunny clime. This is expressed in the film’s most beautiful song, an experiment in waltz-time by Gainsbourg called “Sous Le Soleil Exactment” (Right Under the Sun). He later recorded it himself, but Anna’s wistful vocals and the images Koralnik added (he had worked on pop-rock TV shows in France) are gorgeous.

In her stolen moments, Anna dreams of being a superhero, the “roller girl.” This song is by far one of Serge’s great pop-rock numbers of the period, with a riff that sticks to the brain pan (so much so that later songwriters ripped it off shamelessly). All of the tunes in the film are memorable, but this and “Sous Le Soleil Exactement” are the two that are sheer pop perfection. Unlike the later “Comic Strip” performed by Bardot and Gainsbourg, this sequence has no comic-book element visually, but it conveys its point and also gives us a glorious moment of fantasizing by the lonely, bored (slightly drunk) heroine.

In Le Petit Soldat (1960, released ’63), Godard has a character make a bet with the hero that he will fall in love with Anna instantly. The hero demurs, but instantly pays up as soon as he sees her. Viewers of Anna will have the same reaction, as she is thoroughly charming, especially when seen on her own, away from the playboy’s idealizing lens.

Brialy was notably the only performer to work with all five of the Cahiers du Cinema posse (in starring roles, yet). He is perfectly cast here as the conflicted, spoiled photographer. He had a somewhat flat singing voice, so he goes the Rex Harrison/Richard Burton route and recites-sings Serge’s gorgeously playful lyrics, which works perfectly in numbers like “Boomerang.”

Serge himself wasn’t the greatest actor, but his appearances here are wonderful because he serves as the “jaded best friend” — a Gallic version of Oscar Levant’s role in MGM musicals. Given the high quality and catchiness of the songs here, one is amazed that there was never a second Gainsbourg musical. (Thankfully, there is no “jukebox musical” in store, mostly because his greatest muse, Jane Birkin, has been touring the world with a live show called “Gainsbourg Symphonique.”)

He sings two songs in the film, with the second being a bravura piece of lyric writing in which he cautions his friend Brialy against love — the title “Un poison violent, c'est ça l'amour” translates as "Love is a violent poison." The lyrics posit that one’s behavior moves “from appetite to disgust” and back again — an irresistible notion for Gainsbourg to include in a lyric (one with rhymes and poetry that are untranslatable). It came from his reading matter at the time, an essay by 17th-century French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Lignel Bossuet. (This crap copy of the scene shows just how badly we need to actually get a quality, *legal* copy of the film here in the U.S.)

Serge is quoted in the official Gilles Verlant biography as saying, “[The score] was French rock before French rock existed. I think the soundtrack has aged poorly but the visuals still hold up. I always thought Koralnik was going to have an amazing career. He’s a great director….” [Gilles Verlant, Gainsbourg: the Biography, Tam Tam Books, 2012 (French edition, 2000), p. 286]. It is also noted that these songs were created “under enormous pressure” since Serge kept hitting creative blocks (per Jean-Pierre Spiero). [ibid, pp. 287-88] Half of the score was written in the final 15 days before shooting began.

A quote from Serge about the composition of the songs is included in the Verlant bio: “It was at that time I set my record for successive nights of intentional insomnia — eight nights. At night I’d compose music that would be recorded the next day. In the mornings I had studio sessions and in the afternoon I was playing a convict in the Loursais film, Vidocq. When it was over I slept for 48 hours straight…” [ibid, p. 288]

Anna and Serge sing "Ne Dis Rien" on a variety show.

Musicians are notoriously hard on themselves, and it has to be said that Serge was wrong about the inspired score he came up with for Anna. Sure, at points, it’s effervescent, frothy pop nonsense, but what other songwriter wrote bubblegum music that had the lyric “Baby gum, baby gum!” in a song that openly references (in the title, yet) Stendhal?

There are several beautiful melodies in Anna, but the most touching love song is “Ne Dis Rien” (Say Nothing). The song is performed as a duet with Brialy and Karina alternating not just full lines but small phrases in the verses. The result is a beautiful counterpoint that adds to the romance of the song.

And because Serge was truly in literary mode in the mid-Sixties, the key line is “Suis-moi jusqu'au bout de la nuit/Jusqu'au bout de ma folie...” (Follow me to the end of the night/to the end of my madness...)  This evokes Journey to the End of the Night by seminal dark humorist (and figure of great controversy) Celine.

Anna can be obtained by Americans on the "underside" of the Net, with or without subtitles. There are actually several different subtitled versions of the film floating around. The oddest one is the one that aired on TeleFrance 5 from Montreal, which provides literal English translations of Gainsbourg’s lyrics, losing nearly all of the brilliant wordplay and the emotion as well.

The original soundtrack LP.

The film is truly a missing link in Sixties pop cinema. From its paint-splattered opening (which overlaps, again, with the film work of Serge’s friend, American expat photographer William Klein), to the primary-colored images crafted by Koralnik and cinematographer Willy Kurant (Godard’s Masculin-Feminin, Varda’s Les Creatures), to the sudden guest appearance of Marianne Faithfull (singing her latest single, a Gainsbourg composition), and the triumphant finale, the film is a gem that needs to be seen on the U.S. repertory circuit and be legally released on disc.

As for Koralnik (whom Serge roomed with at one time) and Gainsbourg, they worked together one more time, not counting a TV pop-music variety show, on a rather lousy thriller called Cannabis (1970). Though uncompelling as a drug trafficking crime drama, the film stars Serge, Jane B, and Paul (“Cousin Kevin”) Nicholas. It contains, though, Serge’s other great film score of the Sixties. (The entire film can be seen here, without English subs.)

He deemed the score a fusion of Jimi Hendrix, who he was listening to at the time, and old fave Bela Bartok. Serge described his soundtracks as “laboratories” for music he wouldn’t put on his own or other’s pop albums. The score for Cannabis is a dazzlingly psychedelic creation that remains brilliant with each listen.

And, moving back to Anna, her post-Godard films— and the ones she made for other directors while married to him – will be rediscovered and re-evaluated as the years go by. Recently, one of her best Sixties performances, in Rivette’s The Nun (1966), finally appeared on disc in the U.S.

The films with Uncle Jean remain eternal. Oddly, in some write-ups of Anna it was noted that she “had never sung before” onscreen. Clearly those writers had never seen the absolutely perfect Pierrot Le Fou….

Thanks to Paul Gallagher for help discovering the different versions of the film, and Charles Lieurance and Laura Wagner for some of the Karina pics.

Jodie Foster sings Gainsbourg

I've recommended this clip to many, many folks over the past few months, but now that I've got a forum to directly link to it, I can't avoid the joy that is Jodie in her "in-between" phase tackling one of Serge's most joyous duets — and doing the male part of the duet, at that! This is what YouTube is made for.



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"Roller Girl": a definite Funhouse favorite! (Anna, 1967) (from the old Funhouse blog)

Exuberance is the only word for it. Anna Karina, bored at home, lamenting her dismal romantic condition, dancing around in a hastily assumed outfit, declaring herself “the Lolita of comics,” the “Rollergirl!” This ye-ye-meets-garage-beat gem could only have sprung from the mind of Serge Gainsbourg, and it stands as one of many highlights in his score for the dazzling pop-art musical Anna, which aired as the first French color telefilm back in 1967 (and what color it is!). The “Anna” in question is Miss Karina, who is the elusive subject of a rich playboy’s obsession — only he (New Wave stalwart Jean-Claude Brialy) is too dim to realize she works right in his own photography studio…. I was quite proud to present the U.S. TV premiere of clips from this mind-warping delight on Media Funhouse a few years back, and I’m equally proud to present the Internet debut of subtitled clips from this unjustly neglected bit of pure Sixties joy. Clips from the film do appear on YouTube in the original French, but I was lucky enough to acquire a subtitled copy of the film, so those who do not understand French can follow along with Serge’s wonderfully dippy pop lyrics. Other songs from the film display his songwriting skills to more refined effect, but this little number is perhaps his most rockin’ ye-ye tune, interpreted by a goddess of the New Wave, Ms. Anna Karina. Best known for her transcendent appearances in the films of Godard, she was split from Uncle Jean by the time this film appeared (she looks radiant here, but director Pierre Koralnick couldn’t match the evenly-lit, god-does-she-look-beautiful close-ups of her onetime husband/genius). Anna is instantly loved by those who see it, but it’s been barely seen on these shores — to date, no American distributor has ever acquired it, and I know of no theatrical screenings in the U.S. All the more reason to spread the word — this is a musical I never, ever seem to grow tired of.



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