Death of Jane Birkin: with Serge Gainsbourg, a couple in the legend

2023-07-17 04:06:04

Here’s to slow, here’s to. It’s like everyone at the time, for them who will live together as a person, that in the summer of 1968, Serge Gainsbourg had seduced Jane Birkin. While dancing — very badly — a slow. Not just anywhere: at Régine. On the trail of the queen of the night, their first dance is their last chance.

The director Pierre Grimblat, who is shooting with them in the leading roles in the feature film “Slogan”, an improbable love story, no longer knows how to break the ice between the singer of “Poinçonneur des Lilas”, and the young Englishwoman, who is almost eighteen years younger than him.

She finds him arrogant, he doesn’t understand how the one who barely knows how to articulate in French landed the role… of an Englishwoman, however. The filmmaker invites them to dinner at Régine’s and fails them, like an arranged meeting. They don’t really get to know each other at the dinner table, so Jane leads him on the dance floor. The albatross is less clever and crushes his feet. She cracks at his clumsiness: a dandy who can’t dance, my God.

She revives “I love you, me neither”

Beginning of a mythical, eccentric, electric, playful couple. He has just been dropped by Bardot. She left (John) Barry. The latter, composer of the music of James Bond, is an icon in England. The legend is born at the same time as the reality, and not afterwards, as is usual. Jane performs “Je t’aime, moi non plus”, which Serge wrote in 1968 for Brigitte during their love at first sight which lasted three months. BB even records the future hit, but her husband, businessman Gunter Sachs, refuses any release, as a display of intimacy and his bad luck. No way.

Success was stillborn until it was revived by Jane. Brigitte Bardot, who will remain friends with the singer, shared this Sunday, July 16, after the announcement of the disappearance of the actress at the age of 76, of her “big sorrow, Jane is gone! “. In the documentary “Jane par Charlotte”, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s tribute to her mother made in 2021, the latter two enter Serge’s closed and ghost house, rue de Verneuil – which will soon become a museum – and light up with a flashlight a poster of Bardot which has not moved. Birkin stifles a funny amused laugh. Clash of icons.

“69, erotic year”, “La ballad de Melody Nelson”, “Je t’aime, moi non plus” (which will also be an experimental film directed by Serge) or “Jane B.”, which Gainsbourg owed to his new in love after having written “Initials BB” for the one who preceded her, punctuate these crazy years of our idols. Immortalized by the first clips, where the duo appears forever inseparable. Except that the “me neither” announced that the day would come when “I came to tell you that I’m leaving”.

Tempestuous and graceful lovers

The whole of France, from children to grandparents, vibrated in the 1970s to the rhythm of this couple in love, facetious, stormy, daring, above all, and so graceful, which was not acquired for “the man at the head of cabbage”, that his muse transforms into a more than charming prince. Heartbreaking.

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg in 1972 with Kate Barry, the daughter of actress and composer John Barry, and Charlotte Gainsbourg then a baby. The Hollywood Archive / Avalon/MaxPPP

Charlotte’s childhood is like the public family album. Their story fascinates and warms France, cooled by the oil crisis. He encourages her, she reassures him. She doubts less, he no longer shows off. The beast wounded and tamed by the amused doe makes us crack up, even if Jane’s later confidences, in her diary “Munkey diaries” (the monkey’s notebooks, her stuffed animal), also tell another story: the drinking parties, the nights without respite, hysteria, fury. No legend without darkness. She ends up cracking and dropping him, for the filmmaker Jacques Doillon. He has the habit. And also the art and the way of pleasing. Catherine Deneuve comforts him.

Their story was not a flash in the pan, but a sacred fire that has never been extinguished. After his death in 1991, she sings it, revisits and further ennobles his or their repertoire, through a symphony orchestra. They remained a couple, beyond separation and even death. Yours and yours, divine duo, unattainable and inseparable forever. On our lips, in our heads, the ballad of melody. Who knew how to love each other with so much magic? We neither.