She was 22 years old, with big clear eyes, heart-shaped lips, and an androgynous body that oozed sensuality beneath a collection of tight T-shirts and flared jeans. He, now in his 40s, was still a physically challenged bad boy who tried to overcome it the traditional way: by sleeping with as many beautiful women as possible. A year after they met, in 1968, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg recorded a duet, Je t’aime… moi non plus, which turned the couple into the living embodiment of the most chic and sophisticated sexual freedom. The promise of a more playful and exciting life. Half a century after the scandal caused by the murmurs and moans of ecstasy whispered by the English actress and singer, I’m afraid we’ve been run over by a lorry loaded with the enjoyment we left behind on our way out to the search for great love.
Sexual revolutions give for what they give, and the one of the sixties liberated a whole generation, but mostly they were men. Birkin herself, who died on Sunday, confessed that she was delighted to have been what she wanted to be: “Serge’s object. There was no one more impressed by a man than me.” Above all, she wanted to be loved. And in her diaries, recently published in Spain (Monstruo Bicéfalo Editorial), she describes herself as a woman who “suffered from mediocrity and a lack of personality”, always haunted by her insecurity and the ghost of other women (the face of Nastassja Kinski, the talent and courage of Fanny Ardant…) that she admired more than herself. “He was a great man, I was simply beautiful.” Birkin threw himself into the Seine after a monumental spat between the couple and finally left Gainsbourg after twelve feverish years, endless nights of drinks and parties fueled by the jealousy of both, no longer able to withstand his wild changes of humor about alcohol consumption and lack of self-esteem. He dismissed her cruelly: “You are on the way down, I am on the way up”.
Despite the separation, Birkin never let go of his hand. Not even when thirty years after his death, in the midst of MeToo, the singer Lio accused him of being “the French Weinstein”. He was certainly not blessed and his relationships with women were complicated. He tricked a naive 18-year-old France Gall into singing a song, Les sucettes (Lollipops), without warning her that it involved oral sex. He recorded an equivocal duet with his daughter Charlotte (Lemon Incest). He called Les singer Rita Mitsouko a “slut” in one live show and in another he addressed Whitney Houston to say “I want to card you” … Birkin had no bad words at all to him, but it was not added to the manifesto of the French actresses who claimed “their right to be bothered”. He did something better: he freed himself from the insidious feeling of being a creation by writing and performing his own songs.
