Over the past few years we’ve had more than our fair share of musician biopics – Ray, La Vie en Rose, Nowhere Boy and Walk The Line to name just a few. Now graphic artist Joann Sfar has brought out one about French pop icon Serge Gainsbourg, a star whose story is well known at home in France, but might struggle to entice international audiences in the way that a story about Johnny Cash never will.
The story starts off promisingly. We meet young Lucien Ginsburg (Kacey Mottet-Klein) in 1940s Paris, an insolent, charming, Jewish boy, whose piano-playing father tries to force him into a life in music. Young Lucien prefers art and, while attending art classes, nearly charms the clothes off his model.
Sfar obviously wants this to be more than a simple narration of facts and dates and introduces fantasy elements to help us to understand the artist’s creativity. After seeing a Nazi-era propaganda poster of a Jewish face, the face comes out of the billboard and literally chases him. It becomes his constant companion and eventually develops into ‘La Gueule’ (Doug Jones), Serge’s alter-ego.
La Gueule urges Lucien to abandon art for music and leads him into the wicked lifestyle of a pop star, dragging him away from his wife and child for actresses, models and singers, promising him that he can be rich and famous despite his ‘ugly mug’.
Rich and famous Serge (Eric Elmosnino), as he comes to be known, certainly becomes very rich and very famous, and he beds some of the biggest stars of his time. But this is where the movie starts to lose the plot. Instead of the clever, cheeky, slightly tortured artist, we have a sex-maniac. Sfar doesn’t give us any further insight into what inspires Gainsbourg, he just wanders over to the piano and plays something after another round of sex.
It feels almost as if Sfar is so infatuated – and impressed – with Gainsbourg’s conquests that he forgets about the music. As a result, most of the second half of the film is just scantily clad girls dancing around the screen in front of an increasingly disheveled looking Gainsbourg.
The movie is saved by two things: the music, which, unsurprisingly, is superb. Sfar didn’t try to recreate the music exactly, but created sounds that resemble Gainsbourg’s music and fit into the narrative. It’s second saving grace is Eric Elmosnino’s uncompromising portrayal of Gainsbourg. He’s brash and arrogant, but has an air of vulnerability around him, as if he could be saved if only he could get rid of La Gueule.
The acting from the numerous women that come in and out of the film is fine: they’re there more as sexual objects than characters, so the actresses themselves cannot be blamed for portraying one dimensional characters.
Sfar’s journey into fantasy is a great way to make this biopic more than just a narration of events, and it is when he loses this creative turn that the film goes sour. It ends up feeling like it’s made by a slightly over-enthusiastic fan, rather than a serious, critical director.
Extras: Behind the scenesCinemoi exclusive interview with Joann Sfar and Eric Elmosnino Interview with director Joann Sfar Trailer
Trailer
