Charlotte Gainsbourg

Transnational and transmedia stardom

Felicity Chaplin

• Éditeur: Manchester University Press
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526142993
• Sujet: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Sous-sujet: Storia e critica del cinema

Actress, singer, indie icon and embodiment of Parisian cool, Charlotte Gainsbourg is one of the most intriguing yet understated stars of our time. This book, the first detailed study of Gainsbourg, charts the trajectory of her star persona across four decades, from her early work with her father and ground-breaking collaboration with Claude Miller to her more recent collaborations with Lars von Trier and music producers like Beck and Air. The book combines textual analysis of performance, costume, place, characterisation and narrative with archival research and extra-cinematic materials to interrogate the construction of Gainsbourg's persona. As well as providing a comprehensive overview of her career to date, it examines her circulation in a transnational context and across a range of media platforms, exploring notions of gender, beauty and nationality in relation to her embodiment of femininity, Frenchness and transnationality.

1 The initial(s) C.G.

The formation and initial fashioning of Gainsbourg’s star persona can be traced back to her childhood and early adolescence. From a young age, what would become recurring motifs of her star persona were established primarily through association with her parents and early film roles. Indeed, the narrative of Gainsbourg’s star persona is often framed by her status as the only child of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin:

Even before Charlotte Gainsbourg could walk, she was looking at the world through a haze of dry ice, disco lights and popping flash bulbs. The product of all that heavy breathing between ‘Je t’aime’ partners Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte grew up with nightclubs like Crazy Horse as her creche and Paris Match as her family photo album. (Chaudhuri T6)

Similarly, Simon Banner observes: ‘Being the daughter of two of France’s favourite stars … she is, as she says, used to being famous, her childhood relentlessly catalogued by Paris Match.’ Both the 2011 release of Jane Birkin’s documentary Souvenirs de Serge, a collection of her own Super 8 films, and the 2013 release of Andrew Birkin’s Jane & Serge: A Family Album, a collection of photographs which takes the iconic couple and their family as its main subject, meant that several never-before-seen images depicting scenes of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s intimate family life surfaced, bringing her childhood back into the public’s imagination.

Most press articles and television appearances featuring Gainsbourg are prefaced with an allusion to her famous parents. A 2011 feature for Interview begins: ‘Raised in Paris by uberhip popstar dad Serge Gainsbourg and his muse, the English actress and singer Jane Birkin’ (Ehrlich). In a 2017 piece for Le Temps, Antoine Duplan writes:

Charlotte Gainsbourg, on l’a connue bébé, fille de Jane B., ambassadrice longiligne de la pop anglaise en France, et de Serge, orfèvre splénétique de la chanson et de la provocation. Au début des années 70, les parents de Charlotte sont des icônes. Elle grandit entre les volutes de L’Anamour et les vertiges de La Javanaise dansée reggae.

(We have known Charlotte Gainsbourg since she was a baby, daughter of Jane B., a svelte ambassador of English pop in France, and Serge, a splenetic goldsmith of song and provocation. In the early 70s, Charlotte’s parents were icons. She grew up between the smoke rings of L’Anamour and the dizziness of the reggae version of La Javanaise.)

Even Gainsbourg’s appearance is often described in relation to her parents: her ‘odd, haunting beauty’ is, according to Joe Zee and Maggie Bullock, a ‘blend of her mother’s eternal girlishness and her father’s somewhat morose sleepiness’ (205). The same can be said for her sartorial choices: Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni refers to Gainsbourg’s ‘casual chic that could easily be associated with either of her parents’ (‘Portrait of a Lady’ 230 ); and Carine Roitfeld, who featured Gainsbourg on the cover of the 2007 holiday edition of Vogue Paris, remarks that there ‘is a way she walks, with her leather jacket and her hair in her face, that is half her mother and half her father’ (qtd. in Murphy). Many commentaries on Gainsbourg’s resemblance to her parents describe physical similarities between them. According to Richard Dyer, however, ‘[w]ithout recourse to some very precise semiotic categorisation …, it would be hard to prove that any or all of these physical similarities are based on accurate perception. What is important is the repeated assertion of that similarity’ (Stars 67). In a sense, then, it is difficult to disentangle the perception of these similarities from the continuous assertion of them. In any case, the image constructed by these commentaries is one of Gainsbourg as in part at least an amalgam of the physical (and sometimes metaphysical) traits of her parents.

After having spent time on film sets as a spectator to her parents’ various film projects, Gainsbourg made her acting debut at age twelve in Élie Chouraqui’s Paroles et musique (1984). Gainsbourg plays Charlotte, the daughter of an unhappily married record company executive played by Catherine Deneuve. The film was shot in Paris and Montreal. During the Paris shoot Gainsbourg attended college on the days she was not filming, with the Montreal scenes shot during the summer school holidays. Gainsbourg looks back on the experience as her first taste of adulthood and independence: ‘Ce qui m’a marquée, c’est que c’était ma première expérience en dehors de l’école et du cocon familial. … J’avais l’impression d’être traitée comme une adulte. Je me sentais indépendante’ (qtd. in Bellengier 40) (What struck me was that it was my first experience outside of school and the family cocoon. … I felt like I was treated like an adult. I felt independent). The Montreal shoot was formative for the actress and may account, in part, for the ease of geographical mobility Gainsbourg would display throughout her career.

In what can be called the ‘initial’ phase of Gainsbourg’s career – from her first film role to Ma femme est une actrice (2001), a critical turning point in which she moves from aspiring actress and fille de to a star in her own right – Gainsbourg appeared in twenty films, two made-for-television films, and released her debut album Charlotte for Ever. There are, however, four key moments in this output which played a more significant role in the development of Gainsbourg as a star: her two films with Claude Miller, L’Effrontée (1986) and La Petite voleuse (1988); her collaboration with her father on his film Charlotte for Ever (1986); Andrew Birkin’s The Cement Garden (1993); and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jane Eyre (1996).

‘A sister in spirit to Antoine Doinel’: L’Effrontée and La Petite voleuse

Gainsbourg likes to put herself in uncomfortable situations. This is most obvious in her work with Lars von Trier but was already evident in her earliest film roles. In L’Effrontée, Gainsbourg’s third film and first in a starring role, her character Charlotte Castang is introduced as an awkward and fearful adolescent. Following an upbeat credit sequence, the film opens with a scene depicting a physical education diving class at the local swimming pool. A medium close-up shot shows an anxious Charlotte, her arms clutched tightly to her chest, as she edges closer to the steps of the diving platform. While the other students follow one after another into the water in step with the instructor’s cry of ‘hop! hop!’, Charlotte stands frozen on the edge of the diving board, breaking the sonic continuity and rhythm of the sequence created by the sound of the whistle, the staccato cries of the instructor and the splash of the diving students. The instructor soon resorts to threats like ‘plongez ou je viendrai là-bas après vous’ (dive, or I’ll come up there after you) as Charlotte stands motionless, head down, biting her nails. Following the instructor’s orders, she bends her knees but her legs only wobble as the other students laugh and jeer. The tension is heightened when the instructor tells her to dive on the count of three. A point-of-view shot showing the swimming pool below is followed by a close-up of Charlotte, bracing herself for the plunge. On the count of three, we cut to a long shot in which she jumps in feet first. The ordeal over, she leaves the pool to the taunts and whistles of the other students. We cut to the next scene, inside the changing rooms, where Charlotte is curled up on a bench, a small figure in the large frame. The emotional sequence of the film’s opening is as follows: fear, defiance, humiliation – three terms which will become an important part of Gainsbourg’s star persona.

L’Effrontée, which can be translated into English as ‘an impudent girl’, is a coming-of-age story which centres on thirteen-year-old tomboy Charlotte Castang who lives with her widowed father and older brother in Savoie. The precocious Charlotte listlessly passes her days with the family housekeeper Léone (Bernadette Lafont) and the amiably odd and sickly child Lulu (Julie Glenn). Charlotte is hopelessly bored with life until she meets Clara (Clothilde Baudon), a gifted pianist who is passing through Savoie on a concert tour. Emboldened by her budding friendship with the teenage prodigy, Charlotte makes plans to escape her dull existence and join Clara on tour. The film, which provides a tender, fleeting illumination of adolescence prior to the disenchantment of adulthood, owes a debt to Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel The Member of the Wedding, although no reference is made to it in the credits. L’Effrontée was well received in France upon its release with many critics noting the exceptional and charismatic performance of its young star (Bellengier 56), a performance which won for Gainsbourg the prestigious César du meilleur espoir féminin. In a promotional interview for the film included on the 2003 DVD edition, one journalist remarks that Gainsbourg ‘carries the film on her young shoulders with convincing sincerity and emotion’ and that what is even more impressive about her performance is that the actress herself is ‘a shy and secretive young girl’. After having seen Gainsbourg in Paroles et musique somewhat by chance, Miller, who was at the time writing the script for L’Effrontée, realised that the character he had been describing exactly resembled Gainsbourg physically and morally. The director decided that if Gainsbourg could not play the role he could no longer make the film. Reading the script with Gainsbourg for the first time he immediately knew she was right for the role (Bellengier 45).

L’Effrontée is significant for the development of Gainsbourg as a star for three reasons. First, from her first starring role, the lines between character and actor are blurred by the name ‘Charlotte’, a motif already employed in the earlier Paroles et musique and again later in Charlotte for Ever and Ma femme est une actrice. Second, Gainsbourg brings a boldness and emotional depth to the role which will come to define many of her later roles. This is particularly the case with her portrayal of humiliation, a state in which she seems at home. Third, the César award the role garnered for Gainsbourg and the award ceremony in which her father congratulated her with an open-mouthed kiss, further contributed to the construction of her star persona as scandalous and provocative. The win also foreshadowed Gainsbourg’s Prix d’interprétation féminine at Cannes for Antichrist for an emotionally bold performance of a different kind. L’Effrontée established a deep association between Gainsbourg and the figure of the insolent yet melancholic adolescent, an association she would carry well into her adult life (see figure 1). As François-Guillaume Lorrain writes: ‘le personnage de Charlotte lui a longtemps collé à la peau. Car tout le monde se dit que c’était elle, évidemment cette jeune fille écorchée au petit filet de voix et à la timidité maladive’ (310) (the character of Charlotte has for a long time been part of her identity. Because everyone says that she was evidently this young hypersensitive and painfully shy girl with a thin reedy voice). At the age of fourteen, Gainsbourg became a darling of the French cinema world, a child star who was to grow up through the medium of the screen, hand in hand with the characters she incarnated.

1 L’Effrontée (dir. Claude Miller, 1986, Oliane Productions)

Following L’Effrontée, Miller wanted to work with Gainsbourg again. He wrote La Petite voleuse, based on a scenario by the then deceased François Truffaut, with her in mind. The character of Janine Castang, a sixteen-year-old shoplifter who lives with her aunt and uncle after being abandoned by her mother, had first been envisaged by Truffaut as a female counterpart to Antoine Doinel. There is something in Gainsbourg’s interpretation of both Janine and Charlotte Castang that recalls the defiant and mischievous adolescent played with gravitas by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Set in rural France in the 1950s, La Petite voleuse had its genesis in Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959) and in some ways can be considered the rural counterpart to the urban tale of the young Doinel. According to Annette Insdorf, Les 400 coups ‘was originally conceived with a dual focus, namely Antoine and a female counterpart named Janine’ but recognising he had an excess of material, Truffaut ‘deleted Janine, a little thief, intending to devote an entire film to her someday’ (25). A quarter of a century later Truffaut’s screenwriting collaborator, Claude de Givray, scripted a thirty-page treatment for the film; however, Truffaut’s premature death in 1984 saw Miller, Truffaut’s former assistant, inherit the project, grounding it ‘in a cinematic universe that is partly his mentor’s and, to a great extent, his own’ (Insdorf 25). Miller gave Janine the surname Castang as ‘an allusion to his own filmic universe’ (Insdorf 25). Moreover, Janine is a distant relative of Charlotte Castang both in the literal and spiritual senses of the term. While one may be tempted to see similarities between L’Effrontée and La Petite voleuse, Miller pointed out that the two films are very different: the former is ‘plus rose’ (rosier), the latter ‘plus dur, plus âpre’ (harder, harsher), which is understandable, Miller explains, because ‘plus on vieillit, plus les problèmes deviennent “compacts”’ (qtd. in Bachet and Loiseau 50) (the older you get, the more complex problems become).

With L’Effrontée, Gainsbourg became something of an icon for French adolescence. In 2011, Tim Murphy wrote that ‘French women under 40 emulate her style in part because they feel they came of age with her’. In an article in The Guardian in 1987, Stuart Wavell describes Gainsbourg as ‘an object of veneration among France’s youth’ (36). Writing on the pains of adolescence as it is depicted in French cinema, Carrie Tarr and Brigitte Rollet remark:

The adolescent girl, a frequent trope of mainstream French cinema, is most frequently represented as a Lolita-like child-woman, an object of sexual desire designed to titillate the male voyeur and circumvent the challenge and threat of adult female sexuality. Typical child-women of French cinema of the 1980s and 1990s have been incarnated by stars such as Charlotte Gainsbourg (L’Effrontée, Charlotte for Ever, La Petite voleuse) and Vanessa Paradis (Noce blanche, Elisa). (37)

This reading underestimates the subtlety of Gainsbourg’s performances in L’Effrontée and La Petite voleuse. In a review of L’Effrontée, Molly Haskell more perceptively argues that Gainsbourg’s face, ‘forlorn one minute, ecstatic with hope the next, is like a weather map of adolescence’. Jay Scott, commenting on Gainsbourg’s complex portrayal of adolescent girlhood, writes:

Not since Sandrine Bonnaire debuted at the same age in Maurice Pialat’s A nos amours has a French teenager seemed so assured and complex on screen. Wily and womanly on the one hand, silly and childish on the other, Gainsbourg inflates her little thief into a tragic figure without patronizing or sentimentalizing her; she keeps her realistic. Alternately irritating and enchanting, Janine is an exemplar of adolescence; like the movie that so splendidly tells her story.

What Scott identifies in Gainsbourg’s performance is the ability to embody contradiction, something that would become a key feature of her star persona. In a 2017 article in Elle, Lotte Jeffs describes Gainsbourg as ‘[s]hocking yet shy, provocative yet fragile, brutally honest yet fiercely protective’ and argues that the actress is ‘crushingly aware of all her contradictions’ (110). Critics at the time of the release of La Petite voleuse also noted Gainsbourg’s contradictory quality. According to Mike McGrady, the ‘[y]oung Gainsbourg lights up the screen with a heartbreakingly plaintive quality, a seductive blend of shyness and courage, that wins us over no matter what casual crime she’s contemplating’. Jim Emerson points out that Janine Castang ‘is described by one of her paramours as a bundle of contradictions – bold but shy, quiet but passionate’. Critics also discerned contradiction in Gainsbourg’s performance in L’Effrontée: Edmund White writes that Charlotte Castang is ‘a walking paradox of timidity and cheek’ (78); Mariah Phillips remarks that Gainsbourg ‘plays expertly with rebellion and vulnerability … showing the troubles of being young in a world of adults’; and Jon Frosch claims that ’[e]ven good child performances are often one-trick affairs, but Gainsbourg made her character a tumultuous jumble of conflicting emotions, alternately sullen, charming, brash and tender’. Philosopher Alain de Botton also noted Gainsbourg’s contradictory qualities in L’Effrontée, claiming that the actress ‘seemed … to negotiate the tension between vulnerability and strength with particu...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The initial(s) C.G.
• 2 Turning point: my wife is an actress (and a star)
• 3 ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’: the (dys)functional relationship of Gainsbourg and von Trier
• 4 Generic and geographic border crossings: the (un)homeliness of Gainsbourg’s persona
• 5 Transmedia stardom and celebrity
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Works cited
• Index