The French May swept away the old order. It was the seventies and a new order, artistically and culturally, was emerging between Paris and London, where else? Jane Birkin, as an unexpected link between the two cities, then imposed the same model of woman on both sides of the Channel.
His presence –his photogenicity–, together with an unwavering personal attitude, carefree and rebellious, became one of the references of the time. With long, careless hair on her back, and a body with angular and restrained shapes rather than rounded and turgid, she became an icon of the moment. Birkin, so seventies, was not alone. She had precedents: actresses Julie Christie and Charlotte Rampling, on the British side, announced 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 way of being a woman, carefree and natural, brimming with youth. A style that inspired women to follow in her wake, thus breaking away from conventional beauty norms. Her charisma spoke of freedom beyond established roles. Its slender, even anorexic shapes, of a new feminine ideal. And the impudence of her, of a new attitude in matters such as feminine desire.
Once separated from her first husband, the composer John Barry (author of the James Bond theme), she left British cinema after participating in a film as emblematic of 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, drew attention to her as an actress. And as a character.
Antonioni opened the doors of French cinema for him, and made him settle in Paris. There he filmed La piscina (1969), by Jacques 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. The musical success in the seventies made him move away progressively from the cinema after the failure, precisely, of the cinematographic version of the emblematic song Je t’aime… moi non plus (I love you… me neither) in 1976. Later he participated in films like Death on the Nile (1978), based on a novel by Agatha Christie; Honey (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 the mid-1980s, with Agnès Varda’s Jane B. par Agnès V., Birkin once again found his place in French cinema. In it, she addresses her concern about growing old, and the director of the nouvelle vague reminds her that forty is a beautiful age – they all are – and an opportunity to take stock. With Varda he would shoot, that same year, the controversial Kung-fu master –later known as El pequeño amor–, which talks about the relationship of a woman with a fourteen-year-old teenager.
The Jane Birkin of maturity is a serene woman, much more carnal than in her youth. She laughs without hindrance, as shown by Charlotte Gainsbourg, her daughter, in the documentary Jane for Charlotte (2021), where both meet in an intimate sphere. Released from previous disagreements. Then tenderness prevails and, as I say, the unconquerable smile of the actress.
