Charlotte Gainsbourg films her mother Jane Birkin, with a look full of tenderness.
On the ARTE program Jane by Charlotte Charlotte Gainsbourg (left) in an interview with her mother Jane Birkin (right) © Adrien Bertolle/Nolita Cinéma Photo: ZDF Royalty-free use only in connection with the program mentioned and with the following mention « Image: broadcasting company/ Copyright ». Other uses only by prior arrangement: ARTE picture editors, Silke Wölk Tel.: +33 3 90 14 22 25, email: [email protected]
“I’ve seen myself really age over the last two years, really a lot. I told myself I was going to get used to having wrinkles everywhere and I think I’m getting to the point where it doesn’t matter.” Listening to her mother talk about the passing of time, was Charlotte Gainsbourg aware that this same time was running out and that it was urgent to break this modesty that they had always felt in front of each other?
Most likely. Hence the initiative to place a camera between them, a sort of ideal intermediary to finally better reveal themselves together. ”My idea is to be able to look at you as I have never looked at you or dared to look at you”, explains Charlotte. The result is a brilliant double portrait, a declaration of reciprocal love tinged with a gentle melancholy, now further reinforced since the death of Jane Birkin in July 2023.
It is therefore a beautiful journey, geographical and intimate, to which we are invited, from Tokyo to New York, as part of a tribute tour to Serge Gainsbourg, but also in Paris, rue de Verneuil, in Serge’s house Gainsbourg, which Charlotte was then preparing to open to the public.
A place that remained intact, populated by the vestiges of shared happiness for Jane Birkin, who had never returned there before. But it is also in his Breton property, his refuge, that the Franco-British artist devotes himself the most. Kate, his first daughter, who died in 2013 of a probable suicide, often comes up in the conversation. Maintaining maternal guilt (“Often, I did not feel responsible, I behaved like a child mother, friend”) who accompanied her in her last years. With, as a reflection, this film on transmission imbued with deep sensitivity.
