A living “prototype” of the present millennium’s trendy, zany Channel-hopping “Eurostars,” British actress and singer Jane Birkin is better known in France — her country of adoption for the past three decades — than she is in England or America. However, in an extraordinary showbiz turnabout, she’s riding on the crest of an ongoing “Anglo fascination” for all things with a sleek “Gallic twist,” not least “electro” DJs with a “French Touch”… and is currently enjoying worldwide success with a concert tour based on her most recent album titled “Arabesque.” Birkin, who’s appeared in some 30 motion pictures to date, stars in “Merci… Dr Rey!” a Merchant Ivory Production written for her by first-time filmmaker Andrew Litvack — to be released here at the beginning of December.
The epitome of “Swinging London” during the ’60s, “Calamity Jane” made a huge impression on international audiences, when cast as one of the two mini-skirted fashion models featured in a “rough-and-tumble” nude photo shoot scene, which propelled Antonioni’s 1964 movie “Blow Up” to instant cult status. She married “James Bond theme” composer John Barry “too young,” then took “French leave”… In Paris, at a screen test for Pierre Grimblat’s “Slogan,” Birkin bumped into Serge Gainsbourg with whom she recorded “Je t’aime moi non plus,” an infamously steamy “orgasmic cross-Channel chart-topper” which he’d originally penned for Brigitte Bardot. And, the rest of their helter-skelter domestic saga is history… Jane B. became Gainsbourg’s muse, her “signature” upper-crust English accent adding a zest of quirky humanity to his urbanely poetic, often painful or ironic, lyrics.
Her newfound Parisian “Pygmalion” — himself a self-styled “dandy” with a “conspicuously addictive personality” (drink, cigarettes, the sky’s the limit!) — encouraged her to emphasize her so-called “androgynous” silhouette by sporting boyish attire such as jeans and vest-like white T-shirts, notably in a scandal-provoking movie with an ambivalent, homosexual edge, which he directed in the mid-’70s, also called “Je t’aime moi non plus.” Paradoxically, this look was perceived as “très sexy.”
A fresh take on the “Gainsbourg Touch,” “Arabesque” is the result of a timely “transcultural” collaboration. Via virtuoso violinist Djamel Benyelles’s baroquely ethnic arrangements performed in association with Chebs Khaled and Mami — along with Fred Maggi at the piano, Amel Riahi el Mansouri playing the lute, Aziz Boularoug on percussion and Moumen touted for her “soaring vocal talents” — Jane Birkin revisits the repertoire of her longtime companion, who died in 1991, about ten years after their separation.
Given its “French Connection” and “Arab-esque” rhythms — in the present climate of Franco-American relations, sparked by the war in Iraq — the show could have met with hostile reactions, when it crossed the Atlantic. However, Serge Gainsbourg’s earthly “ambassadress” claims that “though, simplistically, it could have been considered a potential threat,” this wasn’t the case. “I can’t kid myself, the first concert was in New York, at the Alliance Française, with people who obviously love French culture, but it was exhilarating, very touching... In Miami, they actually got up and danced! Finally, they don’t seem that worried over there — they don’t seem to think that they’ll lose money or anything! After all, they’ve asked us to do Carnegie Hall in 2004!”
Jane, who has three daughters — Kate (a photographer, by John Barry), Charlotte (an actress, by Serge Gainsbourg) and Lou (also an actress, by films d’auteur director Jacques Doillon), describes this global tour as a “perfect world” experience, a family affair: “Everywhere we go, it’s the same… At the end, people stand up and cry — 5 000 of them in Constantinople, Turkey, where Serge’s family fled the Revolution! To see Charlotte’s son Ben sitting there, at the back…that was something!”
Birkin finds the “Arabesque” concept “totally in keeping” with Serge Gainsbourg’s humor and sense of tragedy. And, “his gypsy, suitcase and fiddle edge.” On March 2, at the Théâtre du Châtelet, she’ll be concluding this two-year circuit with a “milestone” performance, “exactly 14 years after Serge died.” Of Gainsbourg’s growing popularity “on the other side of the Channel,” she says… “Young people miss him because they never knew him, and they wish they had.”
In between “Arabesque” gigs, she has been promoting “Merci… Dr Rey!”… Like another cinematic icon — Catherine Deneuve — Jane Birkin is willing to take the risk of working with fledgling filmmakers. Could this, in some way, account for the longevity of her love affair with the French public? “What risk…? You can’t imagine how fortunate you feel when somebody comes to you with a story that’s been specially written for you. He could have got the project started with all kinds of actresses, and I really mean anybody! But, for two years, he insisted that it was me he wanted… Litvack is one of the funniest Americans I know! For the sheer lunacy of his ideas… My character is an actress who literally feels like vomiting whenever she sees Vanessa Redgrave — whose voice she dubs in the French versions of her films. At one point, she walks into a room only to find that the dress that she’s wearing matches the wallpaper… and of course Redgrave is there!”
According to “sources close to the artist,” Birkin “never stops.” “If Jane has an empty space in her agenda, she gets depressed.” She’s already started recording her next CD, out in April: a series of duets (of her own making) that she’ll be singing with various prominent “mondo” artists, and she’s come up with a storyline for a full-length feature named “Boxes,” which she’ll be shooting this spring. Top of the bill? Her “actress mum” Judy Campbell — who’ll be playing her mother, alongside her.
The real-life Birkin lives on the Left Bank, but also has a rambling house, dubbed “Chacalou” (“a contraction of Charlotte and Lou”), in L’Aber Wrach, a place on the coast of Brittany whose winds are so rough “that there’s no autumn, the leaves don’t stay on the trees, they get blown off immediately.” This is where, her father, “a brilliant navigator” in the resistance during WWII, carried out 68 missions, dropping his clandestine charges off in pitch dark and going straight back… “When he was 25 and I didn’t know him yet,” concludes Jane, wistfully.
