Most Americans who are aware of Serge Gainsbourg know him from the curiously controversial recording of Je T’Aime . . . Moi Non Plus, a steamy slice of aural sex he made in the 1960s with his then-lover, Jane Birkin.
It is enough to turn anyone interested in knowing more about this enigmatic Frenchman who was a giant on the European pop music scene. Now comes screenwriter-director Joann Sfar to offer a biography of the man, called Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life, a film as audacious as the subject himself.
As she shows, Gainsbourg was a precocious child, played winningly by 13-year-old Kacey Mottet-Klein, and he grew up to an even more precocious adult. The movie takes a similar tone, representing his personal demons at life-size human puppets, both scary and whimsical. Mottet-Klein soon gives way to Eric Elmosnino as the grown Gainsbourg, with a charismatic performance that won him the Cesar, France’s version of the Oscar.
Despite his diminutive size, Gainsbourg was able to attract and bed many beautiful women, including Birkin (with whom he fathered the haunting actress Charlotte Gainsbourg), Marianne Faithfull and Brigitte Bardot. The film is more impressionistic than factually accurate, but that allows Sfar and Elmosnino the latitude to reach for emotional truths. Gainsbourg was a contradiction of opposite qualities and the film about his life is all the more dramatically compelling because of that.
GAINSBOURG. Director: Joann Sfar; Cast: Eric Elmosino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Juliette Greco, Kacey Mottet-Klein; Distributor: Music Box Films; in French with English subtitles. Playing in area theaters.
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Ever since he burst onto the international cinema scene in 1999 with the manically paced in-triplicate Run Lola Run, German filmmaker Tom Tykwer has been a unique voice whose career has been well worth following. (I am even a big fan of his Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, a distinctly minority opinion.)
He strayed into commercial territory with The International, a so-so finance/arms deal shoot-’em-up two years ago, but now returns to his independent film roots with a microscopic examination of a contemporary menage a trois, called simply and pointedly 3.
At its center is a Berlin couple in their unglamorous 40s, Hanna and Simon, who have been together for two decades, but their relationship is starting to unravel due to career pressures, health crises and mere boredom. By sheer coincidence, they each meet genetics engineer Adam and they each are drawn into a sexual relationship with him, an out-of-character impulse for each of them. When the three of them move in together, the complications increase exponentially, but they are modern, mature Germans, so they are each confident of being able to handle the arrangement.
Two of Tykwer’s skills are in casting and in restraining a situation which had the potential to drift into the lurid. Sophie Rois anchors the film as solemn Hanna, Sebastian Schipper (Simon) goes through a figurative rebirth after a testicular cancer scare, and Devid Striesow is coolly inscrutable as aptly named Adam, androgynous and amenable to all possibilities. Tykwer brings in current events, today’s Berlin and a distracting multi-screen technique, all of which probably work against the shelf life of 3, but at the moment, it makes for engrossing viewing.
3. Director: Tom Tykwer; Cast: Devid Striesow, Sophie Rois, Sebastian Schipper. Distributor: Strand; in German with English subtitles. Playing at the Mos’Art Theatre, Lake Park.