Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque) (Joann Sfar, 2010)

[Matt]

Joann Sfar's Serge Gainsbourg biopic gets an absolute rave (with special, surprising, commendation for Laetitia Casta as Bardot) from Ginette Vincendeau in the August 2010 issue of Sight and Sound (which should be available to read online next week). Has anyone had a chance to see it? As I'm sure most of you do, I've got musical biopic fatigue, and I wouldn't blame anyone for dismissing the film sight unseen, but it sounds like a very interesting film (incorporating animated alter egos and, of course, the music).

[zedz]

Not great. I still found it reasonably enjoyable trash, but it wallows in just about every biopic cliche it can find, including some pretty esoteric ones (e.g. the imaginary alter ego, an idea which is pervasive but just sort of there in the film, without any particular insight or necessity, when the notion of Gainsbourg obsessively creating alter egos for himself in / through his art is actually relevant - e.g. Ginsburg / Gainsbourg / Gainsbarre - and could have offered some kind of psychological insight). It's one of those films that's structured like a Disneyland ride, with the bare minimum of time devoted to each obligatory 'big scene' before trundling onto the next one. Okay folks, here we have the 'Je t'aime moi non plus' scandal, just around the corner, you'll see the 'Nazi Rock' scandal (I guess - he performs the song but we don't get much context), and then wait till you get a load of our big showpiece the 'Aux armes et caetera' scandal!

There's way too much box ticking to actually get much depth, and I'm sort of mystified as to what non-fans will get out of a lot of it. There's a couple of minutes devoted to the 'big orchestral project' Serge has been itching to do for ages. It's the Histoire de Melody Nelson album, but you wouldn't even know he recorded an album by that name if you relied solely on this film, let alone know why it was such a big deal. There are a couple of musical references to it, but even these don't really work, since the main one is a terrible bombastic rockist rendition of 'Hotel Particulier'. The album is bombastic, to be sure, but in a much weirder Pink Floyd porn film score way, not a squealy blues rock way. And I can only imagine how baffled neophytes would be by the extended Homme a tete de chou symbolism, since there's no clear link in the film to the album.

I don't know, maybe your average French filmgoer really is attuned to every contour of Gainsbourg's discography and biography in a way that makes all of this transparent (and thus also redundant, which is the big problem with this 'school pageant' approach to biography), but I can't imagine it being accessible to most non-French audiences. Another case in point is the fleeting in-and-out (sometimes in more ways than one) of various historical figures. I'm guessing that international audiences will be okay with Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon, but the resonance of Juliette Greco (who's as big a deal in the film as she ought to be, if only briefly) may well be fading, and how many are really going to understand the significance of Boris Vian? Vian's appearance occasions one of the nicest scenes in the film, when he and Serge perform a duet / medley of 'Je bois' and 'Pink Elephants', but unless you already know those songs, you might not even realise it's a medley, let alone know who wrote them, and thus the presumed narrative significance of the scene would be lost.

Other grumbles - the lack of actual Gainsbourg music; it's almost all blah rerecordings, which sometimes (as in the case of 'Hotel Particulier') completely miss the point of the original. And the filmmakers don't really get his musical adventurousness. The emphasis is on subject matter and scandal, so his co-option of African music in the 60s, for example, is completely overlooked, as is his intriguing play with language and the way he'd cast non-native speakers as his singers (thus Bardot sings in English; Birkin in French). Really, there's not even a cursory attempt to explore what he was doing as a songwriter. And since there's not much insight into him as a person, it seems like a film without a perspective on its subject, content simply to recreate the best-known moments of The Life. And consequently, the actors can only really be assessed as more or less successful mimics. Even Gainsbourg himself barely counts as a coherent developed performance.

Oh, and for some reason, the bio trickles out in the early eighties (sorry, 'Lemon Incest' fans; sorry, Houston haters). I have no idea why.

[Matt]

Damn. Thanks, zedz. I'm sure I'll catch it on video at some point, but consider my enthusiasm severely tempered.

Who plays Delon?

[zedz]

I was hoping you were going to ask that. Nobody. He's somewhere down the beach behind a sand dune. (Not as funny as it sounds.)

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Merde! I was also looking forward to this. I find SG endlessly fascinating and the trailer for this looked so good. The Sylvie Simmons biography is fairly extensive and fills in many of the details, but I was hoping that the movie would add more. It's too bad as SG's life was rife for a rich biopic treatment as this movie sounds to have bungled it royally. I'll have to read Vincendeau's opinion on this as zedz's great review here is burial enough. Does anyone know how the generally excellent comic book guy Sfar - excuse me, les bandes dessinées auteur - came to direct this?

Edit: Does anyone know if this compilation is any good?

[subliminac]

Christ yes its a good compilation! And if I recall correctly it has one of zeds' top fifty films of the 70s.

[zedz]

Is he a comic book artist? That sort of makes sense, though not in a good way. It seems a little bit like the film of the comic book adaptation of a better film.

Anyway, here's the antidote. It looks like all the parts of Jean-Christophe Averty's film of the Melody Nelson album are up on YouTube if you poke around, and it'll give you a much better idea of what made Serge so great (and so batchit crazy).

[domino harvey]

I'd want to hear about someone who has the R1, as I know it came out in R2 first and I'd be weary of a PAL-NTSC conversion prob thing

[FerdinandGriffon]

I second Zedz on everything he said. Totally typical this-happened-then-this-happened-and-then-we-shied-away-from-this-because-it-made-us-uncomfortable biopic.
In terms of actually adding to the film, the animations are useless, though taken by themselves they're sort of fascinating, as I actually can't tell whether they were CGI or a very accomplished mixture of prosthetics and animatronics. And Laetitia Casta is very good here, as she was in Tsai's Face, as much as it may surprise some of you.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Is he a comic book artist? That sort of makes sense, though not in a good way. It seems a little bit like the film of the comic book adaptation of a better film.

Here's the original http://www.amazon.fr/Gainsbourg-Hors-ch ... 506&sr=8-3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
However, weighing in with the naysayers, I was expecting the credits to reveal 'd'apres un paragraphe de Wikipedia.'
As zedz rightly notes it's difficult to see who this is pitched at, since the biographical details skate over (mostly on very thin ice) the milestones of the standard biography and render it dispensible for the faithful and indecipherable to the neophyte. Unless false noses, music drag and female to female impersonation of Birkin and Bardot is thought to be enough titillation.
The animation scenes with their childlike Dufayesque style sat quite well with the childhood sequences but the semitic Mr Blobby and puppet-like alter ego character 'La Geule' was lame beyond belief. A sort of bloodless cross between Jiminy Cricket and Nosferatu.
Perhaps the producers thought they were on to another ' La vie en rose' but we're left with Une vie anémique en rose coloured minor spectacle.