Musical interlude for an actor
Charlotte Gainsbourg has recorded an album after a long gap and sounds a bit like Jane Birkin. But don't probe her about Serge, writes Dan Cairns
18sep06
DUCKING and diving through the traffic towards the appointed meeting place, the taxi passes Rue de Verneuil. This is the Paris street where Charlotte Gainsbourg's father, Serge, lived. It is also where he devised his daughter's debut album, Charlotte For Ever, in 1986. She was already two years into her film career by then, with three roles and a Cesar award to her name. She was just 15.
Twenty years later, she is -- with efficiency and good grace, but little enthusiasm -- promoting her return to the recording studio. It has resulted in her superbly dark and murky new album, 5:55, which is as intriguingly offbeat as her films. Ensconced in the boutique Rue du Bac hotel she uses as a base for what she clearly regards as an ordeal, Gainsbourg sits across the table with a cup of tea and an expression that suggests someone poised at the crease, waiting for a tricky delivery. You can see at once the watchfulness and deceptive passiveness she has brought to many of her film roles. (Her performance this year in director Dominik Moll's psychodrama Lemming was a strong example.) "I did interviews for my first films when I was 14," she says, "and it was awful. I hated having to answer questions. People wanted to get too intimate, so I put up a barrier from the beginning."
She talks like this a lot, in sentences abounding with the precise vowel sounds of her mother, Jane Birkin, yet with the higgledy-piggledy grammar that betrays the fact she has lived in France all her life. It seems refreshingly like unedited candour at first; later, you begin to appreciate the subtlety and firmness of her approach, and how fleet of foot she is.
In fairness, she's probably being both artful and artless. Ask her if she's having to learn to consider herself as a singer too, now, and she says: "No, but it took me a very long time even being able to accept saying that I feel like I am an actress, because I always felt like an imposter. So in the same way, no, I don't feel like a singer." This doesn't, she says, concern her in the least.
Gainsbourg isn't entirely insouciant. She flew to the US when she was seven months pregnant with her second child to audition for the movie 21 Grams; filming began only weeks after her daughter was born. And she admits to incubating the idea of a return to music-making some time before the French electro-pop duo Air contacted her with the same idea. Nonetheless, it sounds like a fraught experience, with the producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Paul McCartney) having to cajole performances out of her.
"I was so shy," she says. "It was difficult to see how I would get there, because my voice was shaky and I didn't have any breath. We tried all sorts of things to make me a little freer. Drinking: that didn't work. Hiding behind a sheet: that worked. Anything to make me a bit more comfortable."
When you hear this, part of you wants to say, "Oh, get on with it." Her remark several years ago -- "I have no imagination: for the piano (she is an accomplished musician), I can't improvise; for acting, I need a director and a text; all I do is follow other people's ideas" -- can elicit a similar response. Yet Gainsbourg's shyness is not of the attention-seeking, come-and-get-me variety you often encounter in actors and singers. Rather, it seems to spring -- small wonder -- from a childhood spent in the shadow of at least one, and possibly two, extremely needy parents (Je T'Aime ... Moi Non Plus was only the beginning), and under a spotlight whose glare arguably deprived her of anything approaching a normal growth trajectory.
It's a tribute to her, then, that she is so entirely unfinished, unpolished even. There are few niceties. She answers unwelcome inquiries with a rebarbative "Why?", a wary, drawn-out "Right" or sometimes simply "No, no, no". She has an infectious, conspiratorial laugh, though it is as often a portent of evasive tactics as it is a sign of amusement.
Gainsbourg has often referred, without any apparent self-pity, to a lack of friends in her life. "But it's the way I am," she says. "People have friends since their childhood. Well, I changed school every year." She pauses. "In order, maybe, not to ever have friends. I don't know." She comes back to this later, almost as if she's annoyed that some threads of ambiguity have been left trailing. "From the very beginning," she recalls, "when I was quite small, I protected myself. I don't feel I had a tough childhood, although I remember people saying awful things about my parents. It was a bit shocking, what they did, how they appeared and all that. So, of course, I shut myself off, and people didn't, they couldn't..." She leaves another thread hanging. Didn't try to be her friend, or couldn't because she stopped them? She looks as if she's swallowing a hot potato. "Yeah," she stonewalls, with finality.
Growing up in France, Gainsbourg witnessed the scandal that her father's alcohol-fuelled activities attracted (not least his duet with his then 13-year-old daughter on the song Lemon Incest, with an accompanying video that showed them cavorting, semi-clothed, on a bed). But this was balanced by a respect for his genius for les chansons francais that bordered on adulation, and certainly skimmed over some of his excesses. British attitudes were far more hostile, shaped in part by a feeling that this bug-eyed French toad had somehow corrupted the utterly English, and apparently irreproachable, Birkin, but also by a sense that Gainsbourg was all shock tactics and no depth.
Somewhere in the middle was probably right. But what critics consequently missed was Serge's innate shyness behind the mask of mayhem. Accordingly, we've found it harder to comprehend the same trait in his daughter. When I raise this, a sudden froideur descends on the room. "I try not to refer to him too much," she whispers. "For my own sake."
She has spent years attempting to secure funding to turn her father's house into a museum, a campaign that is at last showing signs of bearing fruit. But she and her boyfriend of 15 years, the actor and director Yvan Attal, have recently talked about a move abroad. "It's a wish I really have," she says with unusual force. "Just to move."
Discussing how French, or how English, she feels, she answers, revealingly: "The English was really my mother, it was never me. Because, being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.
"I can see what my mother gave me, what she made me listen to or see: very English things, like Morecambe and Wise. But with the English, I'm not really comfortable."
On 5:55, the lyrics -- most of them in English, and chiefly written by former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker -- provide plenty of scope for forensic biographical sifting. Gainsbourg attempted to write some herself, but settled for discussing the subject matter with Cocker. The song Little Monsters addresses playground taunts; Beauty Mark includes the line "Your leading lady needs direction". And the key track, Everything I Cannot See, finds Gainsbourg eschewing the breathy mooching of much of the rest of the album in favour of a vocal stridency that, tellingly, features her most clipped, Birkinesque delivery.
Forced to battle against an anarchically discordant piano part, she sounds, at last, like a singer rather than a hoarse whisperer. "I'm very proud of it," she says with rare gusto. "It's stupid to say this, but it's like violent scenes in films, where you just forget, you have to dive in. That was the same. I just had to dive in and it would be all right. Or not."
Musically, the album -- which also contains contributions from the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, the Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and Beck's father, the string arranger David Campbell -- is awash with noirish sound devices, giving off a strong air of illicitness and assumed identity, of which Gainsbourg's father would surely have approved. More a short-let tenancy than total artistic immersion, Gainsbourg's occupancy of 5:55 is captivating but tantalising. Briefly, she's presented as a recording artist.
Next month, her role in Michel Gondry's new film, The Science of Sleep, will position her once more as an actor. As so often with her, what she seems to be holding back is as thought-provoking as what she delivers, if not more so. You wonder how proud she is of the album, how much other people's reactions will colour her own estimation of what she has created. "'That doesn't bother me," she says firmly. As a self-protective mantra, it's a strong statement. Yet, even now, she sounds as if she's trying to convince herself that it's true.
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