6/10
The first hour of this French biopic about Serge Gainsbourg is fascinating and brilliant, but it runs out of steam somewhat as his life goes on (and on).
In this country, we tend to think of Serge Gainsbourg as the bloke who wrote and performed Je t'aime, moi non plus, a song which mainly consists of a woman pretending to have an orgasm. But this film puts him in a wider perspective. Of Jewish origin, he grew up under German rule, in France, finding ways to outwit the enemy. After the war, he dabbled in art and music, and befriended many major talents as well as being a babe magnet for everyone from Brigitte Bardot downwards. The film manages to comprehend all this, while illustrating the demonic side of his talent with a strange alter ego who accompanies him everywhere. This strange giant puppet-like figure is the most imaginative and daring stroke in the film.
The real Gainsbourg does seem to have been a cross between a filthy-minded Cliff Richard and Oliver Reed on a bad night. He went through marriages and relationships with monotonous regularity, appeared drunk on TV shows and offended as many people as he possible. But his music remains immensely popular in France, and he is very much part of their national identity, along with the likes of Edith Piaf, Johnny Hallyday and other icons whose reputation shrinks as it crosses the Channel.
The strength of the film is that it captures that idiosyncratic appeal, and the genius that allowed him to switch from one musical genre to another with successive decades, and almost helps us understand why so many famous and beautiful women succumbed to his charms despite being his being something less than handsome. But its weakness is that in an effort to ensure that we witness all his various musical personas, the film ploughs on into the 80s when frankly, he was a washed-up bore (and boor). Perhaps the problem is with his life rather than the film, but I could have done with 15 minutes/years less of it.
