The movie Charlotte Gainsbourg cites as a huge “inspiration”
When your mother is Jane Birkin and your father is Serge Gainsbourg, it would be strange not to become a star, too. Charlotte Gainsbourg has been crafting an impressive career for herself from the very beginning, singing and acting alongside a range of acclaimed musicians and actors when she was barely a teenager.
Throughout the 1980s, she appeared in movies like Kung Fu Master! and Jane B. par Agnès V, both featuring her mother and directed by Agnès Varda. She then gave a solid performance in Claude Miller’s An Impudent Girl when she was 14 before starring alongside her father in Charlotte For Ever, which he also directed.
However, the film and a single released around the same time, ‘Lemon Incest’, garnered considerable controversy. Both pieces of media revolved around a father’s romantic interest in his daughter, and Gainsbourg’s use of himself and his own daughter to explore these themes was bizarre, to say the least.
It seems as though Gainsbourg has always been drawn to projects that are contentious, not because she is set on causing outrage and shock, merely because she has an interest in boundary-pushing works of art that challenge viewers. This is evidenced by her frequent collaborations with Lars Von Trier, beginning with 2009’s Antichrist.
The film explored sadomasochism and depression, but its explicit and violent scenes shocked many viewers. Still, Gainsbourg proved her acting prowess and won various awards for the role, including ‘Best Actress’ at the Cannes Film Festival. She worked with Von Trier again for Melancholia and the erotic masterwork Nymphomaniac, in which her character details her long and complex sexual history.
It’s no surprise that Gainsbourg cites Belle De Jour as one of her favourite movies, an erotically-charged French film directed by Luis Buñuel. It follows Séverine, a bored housewife who embarks on a lifestyle change after her sexual fantasies become too strong. She takes up a job as a high-class prostitute to escape from her lifeless sexual relationship with her bourgeoise husband. In several scenes, Séverine imagines herself in unconventional sexual situations, such as being tied up and covered in mud.
Talking to Criterion, Gainsbourg said, “This one is an inspiration for, of course, Catherine Deneuve, but the whole atmosphere of the film, the beauty of the film, the weirdness of it, and the costumes.”
By highlighting the surreal and strange nature of the film, Gainsbourg makes clear that Belle De Jour has influenced her taste in cinema and the kinds of roles she is attracted to taking on. She even admitted that when she was preparing for a movie that “wasn’t really a period film,” she still found that she was “very much looking into her character” for inspiration.
It seems that Gainsbourg is a big fan of Deneuve, who she was lucky enough to star alongside when she made her acting debut. Released in 1984, the young Gainsbourg played Deneuve’s daughter in a movie called Paroles et Musique, directed by Élie Chouraqui. The pair also starred alongside each other again decades later in Benoît Jacquot’s Three Hearts, released in 2014. Once again, they played mother and daughter, which, for Gainsbourg, was surely a dream come true.
