It’s a common character trait that they readily admit from the beginning of the film. Jane Birkin and her second daughter are both very modest by nature, but will be looking for almost 90 minutes to pamper each other and in front of the camera. A dangerous exercise but all the more precious because it is rare: Charlotte Gainsbourg takes us into the intimacy of her relationship with her mother, and there is immediately something very touching.
This is the case when they talk together about stage fright before taking the stage, as part of the documentary was filmed prior to Jane Birkin’s symphony concert at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2020, where Iggy Pop is also present. At 75 today, the artist and former muse of Serge Gainsbourg opens up very quickly with great frankness about the fear of aging, the changing body and of course the disease, as in recent years she has not been spared from problems of health.
There is therefore a very twilight dimension to this documentary, in which Charlotte Gainsbourg particularly follows her mother to her Norman home, a bazaar with no name due to its owner’s inability to throw away anything. The weight of memories is even more overwhelming when they go together to the former home of Serge Gainsbourg, where everything was obviously kept as it is by her daughter.
Another ghost hovers over the film, that of Kate Barry, the first daughter of Jane Birkin, who died in 2013 in Paris in mysterious conditions. We understand that if her mother has recovered well from her separation from her father – composer John Barry – when she was young, she remains haunted by Kate’s death. With great modesty, she talks about loneliness and we see the specter of depression arise as she conjures up her regrets and her insomnia, where she redraws the past wondering what she could have done differently.
Faced with Charlotte’s very benevolent gaze, she also opens up on the excesses of the Gainsbourg era, but also on the sleeping pills and drugs she has been taking for years. These confessions give a moving film, which becomes overwhelming in her last moments, referring us to the universal anguish of the loss of parents. But even lighter sequences bring it all to life, like when Jane talks about her passion for dogs and visits a farm, or when Charlotte films her daughter Jo Attal.
A comforting presence and a source of hope in the absence of Alice, the second daughter of the couple she forms with Yvan Attal, and who has reached this very special age in which independence from her parents begins. This reality reminds us that it is above all a film about filiation, the mother-daughter bond and what is passed on. When these once again universal questions are addressed by Jane and Charlotte in front of the second’s very sensitive camera, it’s hard to keep your eyes completely dry.
Jane from Charlottea documentary available on CANAL +.
