In the documentary Jane par Charlotte, her first film as a director, Charlotte Gainsbourg takes a tender and intimate look at her mother, Jane Birkin, trying in particular to understand the place she holds in her heart. “I started looking for my mother, but also looking for who I am for her,” says the French actress and singer.
This very personal project was born from a very simple idea: following having lived for a few years in New York, Charlotte Gainsbourg wanted to get closer to her mother, Jane Birkin, also an actress and singer. The excuse? Shoot a documentary regarding her.
With a small film crew, Charlotte traveled to Tokyo in 2018 to follow Jane during a concert in Japan. Their first interview in front of the camera, however, did not go smoothly. Jane felt rushed by her daughter’s first questions.
“I was very nervous regarding the idea of installing my mother in an interview context because it’s the kind of thing you don’t normally do with your parents, remembers Charlotte Gainsbourg, met earlier this week in Montreal, where she came to present the film.
“I said to myself that I had to be sincere and get straight to the heart of the matter. And the crux of the matter, for me, was to understand what my place was for her in relation to my sisters, given the fact that we have three different fathers and therefore three different relationships with her. It shocked her a lot because I think that seeing how I had worded things, she said to herself that I had come to settle my accounts. But it was so not that! I simply didn’t have the intelligence to understand that you don’t start a documentary like that.
“Then, a few months later, when I asked her to film it another time, she said to me: ‘No way. We stop there”. I was upset, but I understood. »
The project was therefore put on hold for a few years, before being relaunched in March 2020, during a visit by Jane Birkin to New York. Together, Charlotte and Jane watched the images shot a few years earlier in Japan to realize that the idea deserved to be explored. They therefore sat down together in front of the camera, first in New York, then the following summer in the family home, in Brittany.
From Serge to Kate
Over the course of the meetings, they discussed several subjects together, such as the difficulties of aging, the men in her life [dont bien sûr Serge Gainsbourg, le père de Charlotte] and his relationship with his three daughters.
“I had lots of questions that I tried to organize by theme. But I went there a bit blind. There was no script,” says Charlotte Gainsbourg.
“I also wanted to do a portrait of her alone without my father being omnipresent. I wanted to have this time where it would only be a question of her personality, her humor and her originality, because she really is someone special. »
The ghost of Kate Barry, the first daughter of Jane Birkin born of her union with the composer John Barry and who died in 2013 at only 46 years old, is necessarily omnipresent in the film. For an interview in the film, Charlotte Gainsbourg even recreated the staging of a photo Kate took years ago as she sat with her mother in a bed.
“Kate guided me, in a way, confides Charlotte Gainsbourg. I was trying to make sure that it was present, and that we talked regarding it, because it is always present in our family. It destroyed us all and we all rebuilt ourselves a little differently. »
Although she admits to having realized Jane par Charlotte “in a very selfish way” because she felt the need to be closer to her mother, Charlotte
Gainsbourg is delighted to note that the film makes mothers and their daughters want to re-establish ties.
“It makes me happy when I hear a woman say that the film made her want to call her mother, or yet another say that she would have liked to have this kind of discussion with her mother before she died. It touches me a lot when I see that this link speaks to people, ”she concludes.
Jane par Charlottein theaters since Friday.
