Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
Graphic artist Joann Sfar makes a bold directorial debut with Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life by bringing his own artistic personality to bear upon this tribute to Serge Gainsbourg, the French recording artist/roué who has become a hipster icon. For Sfar, Gainsbourg (born Lucien Ginsberg) is foremost an icon of French Jewish identity. One of the first of the film’s many animated sequences is "THE JEW AND FRANCE" poster announcing Sfar’s underlying theme, as in his graphic novel The Rabbi’s Cat. This immediately distinguishes Gainsbourg as a work of powerful, personal imagination. Not only does Sfar celebrate Gainsbourg’s brashness—from a homely horny boy’s advances rejected on a beach to an adult playboy who beds and makes music with 1960s sex sirens—he defends it. Sfar’s political, cultural and ethnic defense embraces what Scorsese and Todd Haynes were afraid to when it came to Bob Dylan. (Growing up during the Nazi occupation of France, little Lucien insisted on wearing the stigmatizing yellow star—the beginning of his impudence that extended to his controversial late career appropriation of "La Marseillaise" for a Reggae update as "a rebel song.")
Sfar rescues Gainsbourg from hipsters’ self-satisfied claims. This idiosyncratic biopic uses animation and puppets— especially large "Mug" facial puppets—to represent Gainsbourg’s self-consciousness. It also asserts Sfar’s own artistry. The puppet alter egos resemble Despicable Me (as does Eric Elmosnino’s lead performance) with a caricaturist’s whimsy and candor. Sfar gets cinematic frisson though combining animated effects with live-action adult sexuality and politics. The key moment of Gainsbourg’s career unites the former child prodigy with Brigitte Bardot (their "Bonnie & Clyde" recording broke ground for the later scandalous "Je t’aime… moi non plus" with Jane Birkin). Sfar visualizes this sexual-artistic summit through Laetitia Casta’s stunning entrance as La Bardot. She lives up to the legend as an actress and as eye candy. A later pan across Casta’s nude body provides a worthy homage to Godard’s appreciation of Bardot in Contempt. Sfar knows his stuff. Not merely a biopic, this is a fantasia on Gainsbourg’s themes of ethnic selfconsciousness, sex, art and romance, mixing musical numbers with fantasy and biographical chronology. Sfar’s visual wit subsumes Gainsbourg’s egotism and narcissism into cinema as wonderfully chic and sexy as ’60s album covers. Sfar has innovated a fresh defense of the artistic ego.
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
Directed by Joann Sfar
Running time: 122 min.