After the French May, the rubble of the demonstrators had swept away the old order. A new one, artistically and culturally at least, was emerging between Paris and London, where else? It was the seventies. At that time, the twenty-something British Jean Birkin, as a singer and actress, was a kind of ideological Eurostar, at full speed, between the two capitals; even before the first plans for the tunnel existed that, many years later, would end up uniting both cities, emblematic of European modernity.
Birkin, unintentionally, imposed a model of a woman on both sides of the English Channel, as French as British. Her presence -her photogenicity of her- of her together with her unwavering personal attitude became one of the references of the woman of the time, carefree and rebellious. With her long, unkempt hair down her back. And a body with angular and contained forms rather than rounded and turgid ones. Birkin, as a very ’70s woman, was not alone. She had precedents, of course. The actresses Julie Christie and Charlotte Rampling, on the British side, were already announcing something similar. Françoise Hardy, on the music side, and on the French side, represented little less than the same.
It was the triumph of a new militant feminism, with a casual and natural style, brimming with youth. A style that inspired women to follow in its wake, thus breaking away from the conventional norms of beauty. Birkin was, without having planned it, the meeting -or the catalyst- of a woman-fusion, we could say, in today’s terminology. Her charisma spoke of freedom beyond established roles. The lanky forms of her, even anorexic, of a new feminine ideal. And her nerve, she spoke very clearly of a new attitude to address taboo topics, such as female desire.
In music, she will explore the grayest and most conflictive areas with her future husband, the great Serge Gainsbourgh, once separated from her first husband, the composer John Barry (author of the famous James Bond theme). She married Barry when she was barely eighteen years old, after participating in a film as emblematic of cinematographic change in Great Britain as The Knack (1965). It was the swinging sixties, when she participated scantily clad in Antonioni’s Blow up (1966).
Her appearance in that strangely shaped film, more dreamlike than real, although it was brief, definitely drew attention to her as an actress. Or as a character. Antonioni opened the doors of French cinema for her, and made her settle in Paris, from where she would barely move anymore. She filmed La piscina (1969) there, under the orders of Jaques Deray. A psychological thriller that talks about jealousy and distorted possessiveness, where eroticism and low passions rule. With La piscina, together with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, he approached the Nouvelle Vague for the first time, a contact that he would not resume until he shot under the orders, already in the eighties, of Agnes Varda and, later, in the nineties, under the orders of Jacques Rivette, in The Beautiful Liar (1991).
The musical success in the seventies made him move away progressively from the cinema until shooting, precisely, the film version of the emblematic song Je t’aime… moi non plus (I love you… neither do I) in 1976. Birkin had the leading role along with two emblematic actors of the time, the American Joe Dallesandro, a regular in erotic films from the Warhol factory, and the Frenchman Gerard Depardieu. A story of jealousy and impossible love, designed to recreate the erotic atmosphere of the song by Gainsbourg himself, her husband, and director of the film, in which she is inspired.
Then he participated in films such as Death on the Nile (1978), based on a novel by Agatha Christie; La miel (1979), directed by the Spanish Pedro Masó (with a script by Rafael Azcona), and Death under the sun (1981), another adaptation by Agatha Christie in which her presence is rather testimonial.
It is from the mid-eighties, with his collaboration in Jane B. par Agnès V., by Agnes Varda, that Birkin once again has his own place in French cinema. Varda addresses here the fear, or rather, the concern, of the actress in the face of her aging. Birkin had just turned forty and the director of the Nouvelle Vague reminds her that she is a beautiful age – they all are – and an opportunity to take stock. The film, in an unpredictable and original way, is dedicated to remembering, evaluating and thinking about the passing of time. With Varda she would shoot, that same year, the controversial Kung-fu master -later known as El pequeño amor- where she talks about the relationship of a woman with a fourteen-year-old teenager.
The Jane Birkin of middle age, as of her meeting with Varda, is a serene woman. Much more carnal than she was in her youth. That she laughs without hindrance, as Charlotte Gainsbourg, her daughter, shows in the documentary Jane for Charlotte (2021), where she meets her mother in an intimate sphere: freed from previous disagreements, where tenderness prevails and, I already said, the unconquerable smile of Jane Birkin.
