Presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, the documentary Jane by Charlottebroadcast Monday September 30 at 10:35 p.m. on Arte, allowed Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg to get closer, after years of separation.
The 2021 Cannes Film Festival was an opportunity for a famous family to meet in front of the photographers’ flashes. Presented out of competition, the documentary Jane by Charlotte (broadcast Monday September 30 at 10:35 p.m. on Arte) is the fruit of three years of work during which Charlotte Gainsbourg followed her mother Jane Birkinfrom tour to trip, including a moving visit to rue Verneuil in the footsteps of the house they lived in with Serge Gainsbourg. Filming began during a stay in Japan and continued on a dotted line, from New York – where Charlotte Gainsbourg lived until summer 2020 – in Paris via Finistère. Over time, this project acquired personal resonances for both women. In an interview with Ciné Télé RevueJane Birkin explained how this film brought them together: “It allowed me to spend time with Charlotte. I am happy with this experience, because it revealed things that I did not know, that perhaps out of modesty she never dared to say. This documentary is as much a revelation to me about her than the opposite.”
Separated for six years following Kate Barry’s death
Indeed, the relationship between mother and daughter has not always been idyllic. Charlotte Gainsbourg has never hidden the fact that growing up in the shadow of an icon of female beauty was not easy every day, as she admitted in the columns of Marie-Claire : “My mother was the pinnacle of beauty… Really, it was really hard to come to terms with myself as a woman, it was a burden. Whereas sometimes I see photos of myself before, and I tell me I wasn’t so awful!” But a terrible family tragedy still leaves its mark on their daily lives and forced them to live separately from each other for several years: the tragic death of Kate BarryJane Birkin’s first daughter, after falling from her fourth-floor Parisian apartment in December 2013. “We were separated for six years. Charlotte needed to go to New York after Kate’s death and I understood that very well. But I got sick, I couldn’t go see her… “ confided Jane Birkin in Paris Match.
Charlotte Gainsbourg’s doubts about her mother
A difficult period which, according to the former muse of Serge Gainsbourgto the emotional questions of his youngest daughter: “Kate was my first child. Charlotte was my second. She wonders if she was loved the same, we had less alone time. Maybe this documentary is actually a great excuse to be just between us, the two of us, and I don’t want it to end.” A happy outcome for a film which could never have come to fruition, as Charlotte Gainsbourg explained to Release : “I stopped because she didn’t like it. I came back to the task. Then it was me who was feeling bad, it had nothing to do with her, but there, it was she who made me helped a lot and was more willing.” After its presentation with great fanfare on the Croisette, Jane by Charlotte now serves as a testament to their story, which went on hiatus with the death of Jane Birkin on July 16, 2023.
