Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque)2010, France
Joann Sfar
That Joann Sfar’s Serge Gainsbourg film was originally planned to star the famed musician’s own daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, as her father makes it difficult to imagine that, when Charlotte dropped out, anything or anyone that could have successfully taken her place. Sure, the casting of a woman in the role of an iconic, enigmatic singer/songwriter had been done (successfully) in Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan pic I’m Not There., with Cate Blanchett, but the possibility of seeing Charlotte Gainsbourg in drag as her late father, seducing and romancing an actor playing her mother, would have been as decidedly pervy and enticing as Charlotte’s own teenage duet with daddy, “Lemon Incest.” So it came as a bit of a surprise (to me, at least) that Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque), sans Charlotte, is actually quite good.
Certainly Eric Elmosnino’s channeling of Monsieur Gainsbourg, which won
him the Best Actor prize at the Césars, is impressive, but a solid
impersonation does not a good film make. Instead, it’s the bolder
choices made by Sfar, best known as a comic artist, in his first foray
as a filmmaker that elevate Vie héroïque, which he adapted from
his own graphic novel, beyond your factory-line Hollywood biopic. Sfar
too won the César for Best First Film. Throughout the film,
Serge–whether played as an adult by Elmosnino or as the child Lucien
Ginsburg by Kacey Mottet Klein (of Ursula Meier’s Home)–is
accompanied by a nightmarish, computer-animated version of himself,
which serves as a visually exciting and narratively clever device.
Sfar also excels at one of the film’s more difficult tasks: introducing
the many famed women of Gainsbourg’s life. It’s unfortunate that the two
women who get the most screen time, Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin,
are the least convincing performances in the film, despite both Laetitia
Casta and Lucy Gordon’s strong physical resemblances to their
respective characters. However, each of the women represented in the
film enter the film explosively, almost the way I would imagine would
befit the introduction of a series of recognized villains in a
well-known comic book or video game. Villains these women, of course,
are not, but they each provide their own individual challenges to our
hero.
With: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Doug Jones, Kacey Mottet Klein, Razvan Vasilescu, Dinara Droukarova, Anna Mouglalis, Mylène Jampanoï, Sara Forestier, Yolande Moreau, Philippe Katerine, Deborah Grall, Ophélia Kolb, Claude Chabrol, François Morel, Joann Sfar
