It’s a common character trait that they readily admit from the start of the film. Jane Birkin and her second daughter are both very modest by nature, but they will try for nearly 90 minutes to indulge each other and in front of the camera. A perilous 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 regarding stage fright together before going on stage, since part of the documentary is shot before the symphony concert given by Jane Birkin at the Beacon Theater in New York in 2020, where Iggy Pop is also present. Aged 75 today, the artist and former muse of Serge Gainsbourg opens up very quickly with great frankness regarding the fear of aging, the body that is changing and of course the disease, since she was not spared from health problems in recent years.
There is therefore a very twilight dimension in this documentary, where Charlotte Gainsbourg notably follows her mother in her Norman house, a bazaar without a name because of its owner’s inability to throw anything away. The weight of the memories is even more overwhelming when they go together to the former home of Serge Gainsbourg, where everything has of course been kept as it is by his daughter.
Another ghost hangs 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 recovered well from her separation from her father – the composer John Barry – when she was young, she remains haunted by the death of Kate. With great modesty, she talks regarding loneliness, and we see the specter of depression dawning when she evokes her regrets and her insomnia, where she redraws the past by wondering what she might have done differently.
Faced with the very benevolent gaze of Charlotte, she also opens up regarding the excesses of the Gainsbourg era, but also regarding the sleeping pills and the drugs she has been taking for years. These confessions give a moving film, which becomes overwhelming in its last moments, sending us back to the universal anguish of the loss of parents. But lighter sequences also make the whole thing breathe, like when Jane talks regarding her passion for dogs and visits a farm, or when Charlotte films her own 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 precisely this very special age when one begins to gain independence from towards his parents. This reality reminds us that it is above all a film regarding filiation, the mother-daughter bond and what is transmitted. When these once once more universal questions are tackled by Jane and Charlotte in front of the very sensitive camera of the second, it is difficult to keep your eyes completely dry.
Jane by Charlottea documentary available on CANAL+.
