TamTam Books News

Monday, August 16, 2004:

From Sunday's Guradian U.K.


'Serge needed all the love he could get'

After a life of notoriety and scandal - Britain's first frontal nude, runaway lover of Serge Gainsbourg and singer on the banned Sixties single 'Je T'Aime' - Jane Birkin has settled into the role of French icon and English eccentric

Jason Solomons
Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer


 When Jane Birkin floats on to the stage wearing a red dress, there's an audible intake of breath. When she begins to dance, cheers ring out. In truth, it's not a very good dance, not in the traditional sense anyway. There's a gypsy abandon to it mixed with the leaps of a desert shaman, the sway of a sex kitten, the gangliness of a teenager and the warlike poses of an All Blacks prop forward doing the Haka. But the audience can't get enough of her.

Jane Birkin is 58 now and working harder than ever. For over a decade she was the muse, partner and lover of Serge Gainsbourg, the deceased pop poet France still mourns like a favourite son. At first, the French hated her, this skinny English girl who had stolen their rebel, but now, nearly 15 years after his death, they are falling in love with her just as they did with Serge.

She's performing at a rock festival in the former Roman settlement of Avenches in Switzerland, playing to a half-full, ancient amphitheatre as a warm-up act for Lou Reed and German punk diva Nina Hagen. She plays a set of Serge's songs, scored to Arab-influenced music. For all its eccentricity, it's a beautiful concert and one she has been touring with for a couple of years. Sometimes she sits on the edge of the stage like a little girl; then she's drifting about, kissing her band members and telling stories about Serge. By the end the audience joins in with 'Comment Te Dire Adieu'. I see people crying.

'I'm just spreading the happy word, carrying a banner,' she tells me when we meet backstage before the concert. 'Poor avant-garde Serge. He was supposed to go to New Orleans, you know, the Monday after he died. It was all booked and he was going to do a jazz album before everyone was into jazz like they are now. I think people come to see me so they can find a bit of him. He was the most loved man in France when he died, which is just as well because he thought he was ugly and needed as much love as he could get.'

Jane speaks quickly as if fearful that, like Serge, she might run out of time. Her sentences crash into one another. She's self-deprecating and eccentric as only an Englishwoman can be. But she is also Bohemian and expansive, a free spirit the British couldn't handle. When she famously sang with orgasmic abandon on Serge's hit single 'Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus' in 1969 the BBC promptly banned it. 'It wasn't a rude song at all,' she says now. 'I don't know what all the fuss was about. The English just didn't understand it. I'm still not sure they know what it means.'

She fled this country 35 years ago after causing a minor scandal by being the first woman in a British film to show her pubic hair on the big screen as she cavorted with David Hemmings in Blow Up . She departed - already a single mother after a year-long marriage to composer John Barry - and swiftly became a central figure in Paris society, replacing Brigitte Bardot as Serge's lover. In England she is barely recognised in the street; in France, everyone knows her. In 1981, she scandalised a nation once again - this time France - by leaving Serge (with whom she had a daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg) for director Jacques Doillon when she was already pregnant with his daughter, Lou. When Serge died in 1991, she left Doillon and became the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame.

Perhaps because of her constant presence in the gossip magazines over the years, coupled with Serge's desire for publicity, she talks as if everyone knows exactly what she is up to, as if we're all privy to her life. There's an element of royalty about her. To listen to her, Jane could be one of those batty spinsters jabbering away behind a locked door, but there's a sharpness to her that belies the act. For example, she remembers me instantly. We had met on a chat show four years ago when she was tentatively making her way back into a singing career. 'We were on a colourful sofa on an obscure channel,' she says (it was the early days of BBC3). I wasn't even going to bring it up. 'Oh gosh,' she exclaims. 'Didn't I say something bad?'

'Yes. You said "fuck" live at seven in the evening.'

'So I did. But I'm not very good at saying these things in English. My dear ma didn't do a play once at the Royal Court because she had to say "fuck".'

At the mention of her mother, Jane's energy falters for the first time. Her head droops and she trembles, as if caught in a draught. Her mother, the actress Judy Campbell, died just seven weeks ago and Jane has had little time to grieve. Her mother was her heroine, the inspiration for three generations of performing Birkin women. She became famous for her wartime rendition of 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square' and was one of Noël Coward's favourite leading ladies. Jane was due to start directing her 88-year-old mother for the first time next month, in a film called Boxes .

'She was learning her words in the hospital and, God, she actually said she thought it was a good script, which is a huge compliment from her. So I got it all going, got the money and everything.' Jane stops again. 'Bloody English hospitals. You know, she used to come to the shows in New York and play drums with the band and then she'd disappear - God knows where - until three in the morning. She was loved by my friends who are all younger than me. They said they wanted her to be their mother. Well, tough, she was mine.'

Jane has inserted a brief monologue about her mother in her concert and dedicates a song to her. 'She was a diva, utterly irreplaceable. She used to give inspiration and intellect - all of us went into theatre and my daughters would ring her for advice on the best lines in Chekov and which directors to work with.

'She was so beautiful and so dark and ravishing. I felt like a mouse by her side, which is why the mouse went to France.' Jane is off on one of her endearingly scatty tangents. 'And she said I was lucky to be like a mouse, because people would take care of me. She used to say that if you're dark and six foot and glamorous like she was that no one asks if you're all right, but with me they're always concerned I'm about to faint, so they look after me. I suppose I am lucky like that.'

Her mother died in London with her family by her, including Jane's brother Andrew, the screenwriter and director of The Cement Garden. 'She put on pearls and silk pyjamas because her grandson was coming and they opened champagne and when the cork went off she said: "I hope you haven't hit one of my nurses." What a bright spark.' A very sad sigh follows. 'So I plug on as she would have but I like talking about her. It helps. I'm lucky that I can go out there and sing and pay a tribute to her. My brother and sister can't do that.'

Jane is back in London this week, to promote her new film, Merci Dr Rey. A strange tragi-comic farce co-starring Dianne Wiest, Vanessa Redgrave and Bulle Ogier, it's a peculiarly Parisian piece reminiscent of Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen. Jane plays a deluded actress who dubs stars into French and falls in love with a young, gay boy. It seems to be a part very close to her real life.

'Well the director, Andy Litvack, wrote the part for me,' she admits. 'I always have these crazy boys after me and inviting me everywhere. So I didn't have to try very hard because he liked everything I did.'

In the film her character goes into therapy. With so much colour and grief and 'craziness' as she calls it in her life, has she ever tried analysis?

'Lord no,' she says looking horrified; but the question becomes another launch pad for one of her anecdotes. 'All the children have been in therapy, but not me,' she says, almost proudly. 'I did go once but it was group therapy with my daughter Lou and her father Jacques or it was supposed to be but neither of them turned up. There was just me and this lovely older woman and I said I can't spend all this money but I don't know what to do because Lou won't go to school. So I had a very merry hour with this woman who told me not to worry and she just simplified things a bit. But on the whole I don't like the idea of therapy. I think that if I went what they might say is that there's nothing in there, nothing to discuss. It's all rather a let-down. That's what they might say.'

Surprisingly, she has made more than 70 feature films over the last 30 years, starting out in bit parts (in Blow Up , her official role was 'the blonde') and, when she got to Paris, moving into Euro sex-kitten parts in knockabout French and Italian farces with exclamatory titles such as: 'How To Succeed When You're a Jerk and a Crybaby', and 'Mustard Gets Up My Nose' ('They were funny if you like Benny Hill,' she says). Her English-speaking roles came as ingenue maids in the Agatha Christie adaptations Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun, using that famous (unique, perhaps) whispery, mid-English Channel accent. More recent work, however, has seen her deliver tender performances for great auteurs, including Bertrand Tavernier in Daddy Nostalgie (opposite Dirk Bogarde) and Jacques Rivette in La Belle Noiseuse, but Merci Dr Rey is one of her most central and substantial performances for some time.

Surrounded, as she is when I meet her, by her band, her dog, her baby grandson Marlowe ('after the poet don't you know'), Jane looks tired but happy, despite her recent loss. It's hard not to find her hilariously endearing. She reminds me of slender, kooky beauties from Holly Golightly to Annie Hall. Her future seems secure with more touring with her concerts and more films if she feels like it. 'It's not a lonely road, although I'm happiest with just a suitcase and my dog Dora. If they lend me a grandchild occasionally then that's great, but if not it's me and the dog.

'It's only going back to London which frightens me. Much more than anywhere else, though it shouldn't. They see through me, they criticise me the most. Perhaps rightly. They see lucidly through me. I'm afeared of it, I really am. I always think: They can't work out why she's interesting - "Just because she left home? Is that all there is to her?"'

Watching her run through Serge's songbook an hour or so later, it's clear that there's much more to Jane Birkin. The crowd don't want her to leave and she gives two encores. 'I must go,' she says, as Lou Reed waits in the wings.

After the show, I find Jane rummaging through her enormous handbag. It's the famous Birkin bag, the one designed by Monsieur Hermes after they sat next to each other on a plane and she accidentally spilled the contents of an ancient straw bag over him. It's the company's biggest seller in Japan, but Jane has only ever had two and didn't receive a penny for her inspiration.

She's looking for something in the bottom of the bag, pulling more stuff out of it, muttering 'merde merde merde'. Just when you think it's empty, out comes another surprise. The contents are now spread around her feet, laid bare for all to see. Maybe she wants the attention. Maybe she doesn't care what anyone makes of it. I simply stand there and watch. For a moment she reminds me of another, very English, eccentric: Mary Poppins.

· Merci Dr Rey is released on Friday

Tosh // 8:30 AM
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