Every Shade of Black
She’s been a thief, an arsonist and seduced a priest, and feels she’s a terrible mother, yet Charlotte Gainsbourg is sure her father would approve
Words | James Mottram
TO LOOK AT HER, YOU MIGHT NOT THINK CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG IS A PROVOCATEUR. With her quiet-as-a- mouse voice, pallid skin and neatly brushed long brown hair, she seems as fragile as the china cup of green tea that sits in front of her today. But then appearances can be deceptive, as audiences discovered in 2009 when Gainsbourg won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for her role as a grief-stricken mother in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. “I think of my father tonight,” she told the captive audience as she accepted the prize, “who would have been, I think, both proud and shocked.”
Her father, of course, knew all about provocation.
A legend in France, the late singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg – famed for his sometimes scandalous life, lover of Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot – is best known in Britain for his 1969 hit single Je t’aime moi non plus – a scandal at the time for the suggestive moans and groans on the track, which he crooned together with Charlotte’s mother, British actress Jane Birkin. But from burning a 500 Franc note on French television to protest against taxation levels – which led to Charlotte being picked on at school, as a gang of kids set fire to her books – to drunkenly offering sex to fellow chat-show guest Whitney Houston, Serge was no shrinking violet.
In 1986, he directed his daughter in Charlotte For Ever. The story of an alcoholic screenwriter and his daughter, the sight of her lolling around on a bed with him caused outrage in his homeland. Gainsbourg later went on to make her English-language debut in the 1993 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden – directed by her uncle, Andrew Birkin – in which she played the older sister in an incestuous relationship.
Gainsbourg had already made a name for herself by this point, playing a series of troubled teens. Making her screen debut when she was just 12 as Catherine Deneuve’s difficult daughter, in Paroles et Musique, she then won a César – the French equivalent of an Oscar – for Most Promising Actress, for another angst-ridden adolescent in Claude Miller’s 1985 film L’Effrontée. She followed this three years later with La Petite Voleuse, playing a 16-year-old thief, and adding adultery and GBH to her list of felonies.
“They were very important films for me,” she says. “I liked being that age and experiencing shoots with a lot of naïveté. I remember them very precisely. It’s interesting that I chose this path. In retrospect, I might have been intimidated, pursuing the same paths as my parents – music, acting – but I was still a kid when I started so there wasn’t anything conscious about it. As a child I didn’t analyse it. I just enjoyed it. My mother always made it seem like heaven to make a film,” she adds, a sentiment Gainsbourg shares. “Enjoying myself, forgetting myself in scene. Really, it is very selfish.”
It’s worth taking a moment to listen to Gainsbourg. As flawless as her English is – spoken without a hint of a French accent – her delivery is deliberate and methodical. “I have problems with words sometimes,” she says, flattening out her vowels, as if she’s still taking elocution lessons at the Swiss boarding school where she spent her teenage years after her parents’ divorce in 1980. Indeed, when we meet in a shady room overlooking the sunlit French Riviera, there is still something adolescent about her. Wearing her usual outfit of a white T-shirt, dirty white trainers and skinny blue jeans that accentuate her long, boyish limbs, she exudes an air of vulnerability.
Just as her beauty campaign for Balenciaga perfume indicates, it’s hard to believe she’s about to turn 40.
Perhaps there will always be something of the rebel in Gainsbourg. In 1991’s Merci la Vie, she played a naïve schoolgirl led astray to commit arson and assault, and in the Taviani Brothers’ Night Sun, she seduced a priest. Yet nothing quite compares to Antichrist – not least with the film’s horrific scene of madness-induced self-mutilation.
“The list of proposals I got after Antichrist. There was every shade of black: from the crazy matricide to the maniac-depressive who had lost a loved one. It’s as if I’m only seen as the right actress for mourning. And yet I’m not such a dark person.”
Does she think her father would have been shocked? “I’m not living my life only with that relationship,” she replies. “I had to say this [in my acceptance speech] – and it was important. But I’m not doing films and music thinking about him all the time.”
It’s evidently a touchy subject, certainly in light of the recent arrival of Joann Sfar’s surreal biopic Gainsbourg. “I wasn’t in Paris [when it was released], which was quite helpful,” she says. “I didn’t see the film and I didn’t want to see it.” Yet Sfar initially wanted Gainsbourg to be heavily involved – not only in granting music rights but also playing her father (given Gainsbourg’s appearance in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, in which seven actors – including Cate Blanchett – played Bob Dylan, the idea isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds). “I couldn’t be involved,” she stammers. “It was a weird thing.”
Along with an assortment of half-siblings from her father’s various relationships, Gainsbourg has been managing his estate since he died of a heart attack in 1991. “After all those years, it’s still painful and difficult for me,” she says quietly. “The fact that I’m forced to think about it, to decide… I don’t find it easy.”
Even looking in the mirror, at her ungainly nose, bushy eyebrows and pert lips, she must be reminded of her father. For years, her heritage left her notoriously awkward when facing the press. “It was a pride thing, to keep my life secret, and keeps as many secrets as I could. And I was very, very shy. I felt bad about myself.”
But that was then. Gainsbourg is a parent herself now, together with her partner, actor/director Yvan Attal, whom she met on the 1990 film Autobus (they’ve acted together several times since). Their son Ben is now 13, and daughter Alice is eight. “It has anchored me in real life,” she says of being a parent. “I think I changed when my first child was born.” Does she find it difficult to strike a balance between work and motherhood? “It is very difficult,” she nods. “I think I’m a terrible mother but I’m doing my best.”
It’s a theme that resonates strongly with her upcoming film, The Tree. Gainsbourg plays Dawn, a mother-of-four living in the Australian countryside who falls apart when her husband dies of a heart attack.
“I like the fact she’s not a perfect mother,” she says. “In my idea, he was the strong character of the family. And she was able to be original and have her own ways. When he dies, she can’t cope with the responsibilities. And she has to slowly learn and discover her role.”
Her first time in Australia, was it a culture shock? “Sort of,” she smiles. “More nature shock.” Born in London, but raised and now based in Paris, Gainsbourg has always lived in cities – so spending three months in “the middle of nowhere” (Queensland) was quite something.
As Dawn begins to believe her husband’s spirit has entered into the giant fig tree that overshadows the house, Gainsbourg had to get up close and personal with Australia’s flora and fauna. “I was very scared about the redback spiders that I had heard of and the brown snakes,” she shudders. “Quite terrified.” Did she see any? “I met a snake. I didn’t know what it was!”
At least she was not alone, bringing her two children with her. “I wouldn’t have gone that far without them. Already it was difficult because my husband was not part of this. We were three mothers – the producer, Julie [Bertucelli, the director] and me – on their own with their children. No men around. And the story was about that. So I imagine it was helpful. But I wouldn’t have gone that far, alone, on my own.”
Like Antichrist, it’s a film about death and grief – but this attraction to morbid material is no coincidence. In the summer of 2007, Gainsbourg had a minor water- skiing accident. A few months later, she came down with “a seven-day headache” and went to her doctor in Paris. There, she discovered her brain had been pushed to one side as her head had begun to fill with blood. By rights, she should’ve either been dead or paralysed.
While the emergency surgery – which consisted of drilling a hole in her head – was a total success, it left Gainsbourg understandably shaken. For the next few months, she thought of little else, going for a series of MRI scans under the belief that she was still at death’s door. “I was very surprised to see how weak and fragile I was,” she told The Observer newspaper last year. “That was very new. I had always thought I was very strong and courageous. I had no idea how scared I was of dying.”
By spring 2008, Gainsbourg made her first tentative steps towards returning to normal life, flying to LA to work with the musician/producer Beck, who’d previously sampled her father’s classic song Melody Nelson for the track Paper Tiger. The result was third album IRM – the French abbreviation for MRI (a title that came after she played Beck the sound that the scanner makes).
“The weird thing is, since I’ve had my accident, I’ve done Antichrist, which was about death, I’ve done The Tree, which was about death, and I’ve done an album which talks a lot about death and memories,” she ponders. “So of course it must’ve done something. But at the same time, I haven’t written those scripts. They came and looked for me. Of course, I was attracted once I read it. But it was a coincidence.”
So how does she feel about it now? “I like thinking about death,” she says. “I’m scared, but I imagine its part of everybody’s preoccupations. It’s a powerful subject.”
I ask whether Gainsbourg’s next film, Melancholia – a reunion with von Trier – has to do with death. “Vaguely,” she teases. Given it’s called Melancholia, and deals with two sisters (Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst) who find their relationship tested when a nearby planet threatens to collide with Earth, you can bet it does.
Yet Gainsbourg says her reason for taking it on wasn’t the theme, but another chance to work with von Trier. “The experience of the work, being directed by him, was so special on Antichrist. Really, I had never experienced something like that before.”
Doubtless it will be another controversial moment in her career. As French director Bertrand Blier once said, “You ignore Charlotte Gainsbourg at your peril, because one day, she’s going to explode in all our faces.”
The Tree will be showing in the UK from 3 June. Melancholia will be showing from 1 July.
