Charlotte Gainsbourg’s film is a portrait of her mother, the English-born, Serge Gainsbourg-wed Jane Birkin, a singer, movie star and sex symbol in the sixties and seventies with films like Blow Up, La Piscine and Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime, moi non plus (also showing at the VIFF Centre this week). It’s clear from the film both how much mother and daughter share – Charlotte too, is an actor and singer, and exudes a mixture of openness and diffidence which appears to be a Birkin characteristic – and that they’re not as close as they might like to be. The death of Charlotte’s half-sister Kate Barry – she fell out of a window in 2013, age 46 – inevitably casts a shadow, though the film is observational, not probing, an artistic study, not a biography.
Discussing the perils of aging, the joys of being a middle child, or shared parenting fears, their exchanges on camera reach fascinating corners of their relationship.
Carlos Aguilar, LA Times
Soft, intimate, and revealing.
Katie Walsh, The Wrap
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg
France
2022
French and English with English subtitles
Book Tickets
Credits
Producers
Mathieu Ageron, Maxime Delauney, Romain Rousseau, Charlotte Gainsbourg
Cinematographer
Adrien Bertolle
Editor
Tianès Montasser