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Gainsbourg, vie heroique
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4/5 Stars.
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The film charts Serge's early years, being born Lucien Ginsbourg in Paris, 1928, the son of Jewish émigré parents. Attending arts school, the young Lucien has to leave Nazi-occupied Paris, but is soon playing piano in a Paris bar once the war ends. As his songs make him famous, Gainsbourg (Elmosnino) launches his own career as a singer, his celebrity growing as he dates the likes of Birkin (Jordan) - with whom he has daughter, Charlotte, his teenage duet on Lemon Incest - and Brigitte Bardot (Casta)...
THE VERDICT: Jane Birkin isn't too happy with it, but the critics have been pretty darn ecstatic about Joann Sfar's evocative biopic – or 'fairytale', as the credits state - of the lascivious lounge lizard who was one of France's most celebrated popular artists of the last century. Like a rampant, constantly aroused Leonard Cohen, Gainsbourg was an icon of his generation. For Sfar, the mission though is to concentrate on the artist, not the latter-day unshaven Lothario.
If you want to understand the lure of that latter-day Gainsbourg Sfar isn't so crazy about, just pop along to youtube and enjoy his 1986 chatshow appearance alongside Whitney Houston, the 58-year old crooner flatly saying of the 25-year-old, still-hot and still-functioning, soul diva “I would like to ferk her”. Live on air. He would have been a much better bet than Bobby Brown. And a much better ferk too, most likely.
Sfar's film is made with blatant poetic license, but, you feel, that's just how Gainsbourg would have wanted it...
Review by Paul Byrne
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