Look/Listen

The sneaky, unruly influence of French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg has been simmering in the melting pot of American music for over four decades, adding a singular Gallic seasoning to a plethora of border-spanning genres. Gainsbourg’s songs have been covered by artists from Dionne Warwick to Luna, while his arrangements and eclecticism have had a far-reaching effect on the development of pop, rock, jazz, hip-hop, R&B, and folk in the 20th century. Given Gainsbourg’s profile, not to mention his status as a French cultural hero, it was perhaps inevitable that his life would one day be the subject of a film from that dreaded subgenre, the musical biopic. Fortunately, the musician could scarcely find a film-maker as obsessively devoted and fittingly unreserved as comic artist Joann Sfar, who has adapted his own graphic novel into his debut feature film, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life. This Sunday through Thursday, the film will be screening nightly at the Webster University Film Series.

Like Gainsbourg, Sfar is a French Jew who has integrated elements of his cultural heritage into his work, and the director plainly views the irrepressible, insecure, and prolific musician as a kindred spirit. The approach that Sfar employs for his film recalls the 2009 Russian biopic of Soviet-American poet Joseph Brodsky, A Room and a Half, and not merely because Gainsbourg’s ambivalent attitude towards his Jewishness mirrors Brodsky’s. As with A Room and a Half, Gainsbourg is a grab-bag of glittering nostalgia and whimsical fantasy, a biographical work that is less concerned with accuracy or story than with conveying a sense of its subject through gimmicky gestures and baroque trimmings.

Not unexpectedly, the film’s evocation of Serge Gainsbourg is tethered to the man’s music, a catalog that defies easy categorization and flits through genres with abandon. However, while Gainsbourg features a suitably ample dose of the man’s most famous songs, the film is not a musical. It is, rather, a rapid-fire tour of a musical life, shepherded by Sfar’s undeniably off-kilter sensibilities. By means of animation, puppetry, and a cheerfully unrestrained taste for magical realism, the film offers an acid-trip glimpse of the musician’s persona as the film-makers imagine it: restless, self-doubting, and weirdly child-like. The bizarre acme of this approach is the presence of “The Mug,” a grotesque caricature of Gainsbourg that shadows him throughout his life. Played by the indispensable Doug Jones in a creepy mask with enormous nose and glow-in-the-dark eyes, the whispering Mug is part diabolic id and part discomfiting memento of Gainbourg’s Jewish identity.

From Gainsbourg’s formative years in Nazi-occupied France (where he is played by Kacey Mottet Klein), the film alights on a succession of pivotal moments in his adult life (where acting duties shift to Eric Elmosnino), with a particular focus on his musical career and his tempestuous relationships with women. For viewers who are not French or aficionados of Gainsbourg’s music, the film’s allusions and historical nods will likely be opaque. When Gainsbourg offers to write the innuendo-laden “Les Sucettes” for teen idol France Gall, or when he plays a demo of the scandalous “Je t’aime… moi non plus” for a producer, the impact of the moment depends on the viewer’s knowledge of French pop history. Fortunately, the film’s style is sufficiently appealing and eccentric that viewers who know little about music will still find many aspects of Gainsbourg beguiling.

This reliance on arch references to historical events does, however, reveal the limitations of the film’s approach, and a perennial problem with biopics of all stripes. The tendency to traipse through the highs and lows of Gainsbourg’s life as though through a shopping list grows tiresome. Next: Serge has a torrid dalliance with Brigitte Bardot! Next: Serge tweaks noses with his reggae cover of the French national anthem! The film presents such episodes with plenty of flourish and verve, but without much in the way of narrative rhythm or thematic coherence. The women of Gainsbourg’s life in particular suffer under this approach, becoming mere mile-markers: Elisabeth Levisky (Deborah Grall), Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis), Bardot (Laetitia Casta), Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon), and Bambou (Mylène Janpanoï) appear and then recede into the distance. Gainsbourg’s stabs at psychological insight—typified by the lurking Mug—are simplistic, and lack the bite evident in recent autobiographical films of comparably fanciful tone, such as My Winnipeg, Persepolis, and The Beaches of Agnès. Despite his inventiveness (and perhaps due to his slavish affection), Sfar manages to craft only a quirky, handsomely illustrated version of the singer-songwriter’s Wikipedia entry. Fortunately, this is just sufficient to make Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life a worthwhile film.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series. Wyatt has worked as a freelance writer and game designer since 2000. When not watching, thinking about, and writing about cinema, he assumes the mild-mannered secret identity of an environmental scientist. He completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., but returned to St. Louis to attain a master’s degree in environmental science from Washington University. He has been happily married since 2001.