Descendant of the most famous lineage of Gallic pop, Charlotte Gainsbourg (London, 50 years old) rests on the sofa in a hotel suite where he has just presented Les passagers de la nuit (Passengers of the night) within the Berlin International Film Festival. Dressed in a leather jacket and tight jeans, her image contrasts with the outfits gala evening: black suit Saint Laurent (it is the image of the house since 2017), lacing ad hocwhite shirt and matching heels.
Being the daughter of the English actress and singer jane birkin and of the musician and official French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg, the performer’s photo should appear in dictionaries next to the word sophistication. Directed by Mikhaël Hers, The passagers of the night it’s a (another) return to the eighties in which she embodies a recently separated mother struggling to support herself and her two children.
“We are always nostalgic about our youth and we intend to return to it,” he explains in a fragile, almost whispering voice, which betrays his acknowledged insecurity. “Both for the director and for me, that decade is the one of our adolescence, the one of our first times in crucial questions. For me it has been very curious when the younger actors came to the set, with that eighties design, and they saw certain devices like a cassette and said: ‘But what is this?’. It was as if they came from another planet.”
It was in that decade when, at the age of 13, he landed his first leading role in L’effrontée (1985), by Claude Miller, while making his debut in music with Lemon Incest (1985), a song written by her father and performed by both that it was all a scandal. Shortly after he would arrive Kung Fu Master (1988), signed Agnes Vardawhich also did not get rid of its fair share of controversy and which had a hard time finding its own distribution channel.
“Throughout my career I have made a few quite controversial films, although for me that was not a shoot. She was working at the time on the documentary about my mother, Jane B. by Agnès V., and was living in our house for a year. I was very angry, because when I came back from school I found the whole team wandering around the rooms. But I never got to see it in the cinema.” Sorry? “Yes, I have never seen Kung Fu Master. I don’t like to watch my movies, not even the old ones. I did see the documentary. I love Agnès and I know she was very important to my mother. But having her all day hanging around my house? No thanks,” she jokes with brutal, almost unfiltered honesty.
That story narrated the affair of a divorced woman (Birkin) with a 14-year-old boy, a classmate of her daughter (Gainsbourg herself). A very uncomfortable script written in four hands by Varda and Birkin, in a kind of feminine reverse of films like Pauline on the beach (1983), from Eric Rohmer (who, by the way, has his little tribute in The passagers of the night). “It was another time,” Gainsbourg assumes. “Besides, I had already been through the whole Lemon Incest And I didn’t get to experience that scandal either because I was studying at a boarding school and I was quite protected.
It was some time later when he understood the dimension of all the cultural earthquakes in which he had participated. “Today we couldn’t do any of that. Not because people have a new morality, because those movies and songs at the time were also a shock. Although I think they did not intend to be controversial, but moving ”.
Since then, it hasn’t gone bad for her. This is confirmed by feature films such as 21 grams (2003) and the science of sleep (2006,) or his long collaboration with Lars von Trier since antichrist (2009), with which she won the award for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, for nymphomaniac (2013). In addition, in 2021 she made her directorial debut with Jane for Charlotte, a docudrama about the life of his mother. And, to top it off, he can boast of a long musical career (his thing is pop with a tendency to the vaporous) that has been leaving records with a dropper: Charlotte For Ever (1986); 5:55 (2006), in which Air and Jarvis Cocker; MRI (2009), with Beck at the controls; Stage Whisper (2011) and Rest (2017).
”Cinema is a liberation, something I am much more familiar with. Even though I don’t feel professional, I get less nervous.” With music it’s another story. “I am a bundle of nerves, I am insecure in all the steps of the production. Now I start to write lyrics and I always have the same doubts: Will they be good? Where am I going to get inspiration from? I don’t know how to judge what I’m doing. Neither in acting, but I trust the director. I would love to be able to listen to my songs, because I don’t like my voice at all.”
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Charlotte Gainsbourg: “I don’t like to watch my movies, not even the old ones”