My father and the incest scandal
Actress Charlotte Gainsbourg tells Craig Mclean about performing with her father – and why #Metoo has stalled in France
On a rainy day in Reims, the late Serge Gainsbourg – France’s most celebrated musician, actor and provocateur – is very much on his daughter’s mind. Now 46 years old, Charlotte Gainsbourg remembers clearly embracing his lifeless body in 1991, when she was just 19. “I was still sort of a baby,” she says in smooth, unaccented English, her light speaking voice recalling that of her English mother, Jane Birkin (both are triple-threats: singer, actress, model). Almost three decades on from her father’s death, she has captured that moment in Lying With You, a song on her new album, Rest.
Sitting in a deserted rock club 81 miles north-east of Paris, Charlotte explains how it has taken her a long time to get to a place when she can think of that time as a beautiful moment. Back then, she remembers, “I was still immature, so his death struck me in such a violent way”.
Birkin and her roguish French husband epitomised the Swinging Sixties and the permissive culture of the Seventies. Charlotte was catapulted into the limelight aged just 12 when her father wrote for her the single Lemon Incest and the pair starred in a not wholly subtle video.
Was she aware of the message of the song? “Yes, yes, of course. But my father immediately made me look into the lyrics – it says ‘the love that we’ll never do together’. So it was very specific. Of course he plays with words, and the incest is a provocative statement. But it’s a very innocent… Ah,” she grimaces, “it’s weird to say it’s an innocent song. But I wasn’t shocked. I knew my father, and I wasn’t scared about what he was talking about at all.”
Neither was his then-wife. I interviewed Birkin last year when the 71-year-old was promoting Symphonique, her album of reworkings of the love songs Serge wrote for her during their (of course) tempestuous relationship.
“I thought it was perfectly beautiful,” said Birkin of Lemon Incest, her gap-toothed smile radiant. “But I knew it would cause quite a stir.” So she hastily arranged for her daughter to audition for a role as her friend Catherine Deneuve’s daughter in the film Paroles et Musique (1984). The adolescent got the part, much to her mother’s relief: “I remember thinking: ‘Now, when Lemon Incest comes out, people will see Charlotte be herself in something else – not manipulated somehow.’ ”
Manipulation, artistic and otherwise, was the hard-living Serge’s stock-in-trade. He made a point of shocking. He wrote the sexiest – or, sleaziest, depending on your view – song ever, Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus.
In 1986, the professional Lothario infamously announced on a French TV chat show that he’d like to “f---” Whitney Houston, his fellow guest on the programme.
What, I wonder, would the scandalous Serge have made of the #Metoo era?
“Oh,” replies Charlotte, popping eyes framed by her gamine haircut. “Um… he would have made provocations about it. It was that era where everything was possible. Of course he would have been criticised. He wasn’t misogynistic at all,” she insists. “But as a persona, he was. And quite manipulative. It was also this oldfashioned way. But he put my mother and other women on a pedestal.
“But,” she frowns, “I don’t know what to think about this [#Metoo] era. I think it’s a wonderful thing that women are talking, and we can’t go back now. But the extreme,” Charlotte winces, referring to the torrent of accusations and the range of alleged transgressions, “I hate, and I don’t understand.”
Surprisingly, she wasn’t asked to sign January’s open letter from 100 female French artists and academics – Deneuve was a high-profile signatory – which decried social media campaigns such as Time’sup for launching a “puritanical… wave of purification”. And nor, she says, would she have.
“I do understand her point of view and what that letter meant. And I agree with wanting to oppose witch-hunts. That I really understand. But it was the worst timing.”
However, she does acknowledge that there’s a quite specific Gallic context for the letter. “Harassment must be the same everywhere, but we have a different culture for sure. So it’s easy for us as women to see what’s going on in America and in the UK and laugh a little about it, and find it a little extreme.”
Does anyone have a more uniquely advantageous view on the postweinstein world than Charlotte Gainsbourg? She was born in London, raised in France and lives in New York with her theatre director partner, actor/director Yvan Attal, and their three children. Her work began in childhood with that single. She has starred in two of the most controversial films of modern times, Antichrist and Nymphomaniac. In the former, she cut off her clitoris with scissors (a performance for which she won Best Actress at Cannes); in the latter she played the title role. Both films were directed by Danish auteur Lars von Trier, who has been accused by Björk of sexually harassing her during the making of Dancer in the Dark (von Trier denies the charge).
“I love Lars. With me he’s been a wonderful person, and he’s never molested me in any way,” Charlotte states firmly. “I was manipulated in an emotional way, of course – but that’s my job. And it’s his style! If you don’t want to feel uncomfortable, don’t go there. I love being uncomfortable. It’s maybe a perversion I have.”
She says “of course” she’d work with von Trier again. What of Woody Allen, also at the centre of accusations? Would she make a film with him?
“Of course,” Gainsbourg says again, “I’ve admired him all my life. I don’t know what the accusations are.”
I remind her that his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow recently repeated her 1992 accusation that Allen sexually assaulted her when she was seven (which Allen has denied). While an investigation by New York state child welfare found that the abuse didn’t happen, her claims have gained renewed prominence, partly because of the support of her brother Ronan, the journalist who exposed Harvey Weinstein. Some of Allen’s recent collaborators – including Rebecca Hall and Greta Gerwig – subsequently said they regret working with him.
“It’s very hard to take sides,” Charlotte begins, clearly troubled. “It’s hard to say, ‘so do you believe that this girl was molested?’ Do you have to take her side because she’s the victim? I don’t know…
“If there are all these accusations, well then, go to court again, and defend yourself. And he has to defend himself. And try and
‘If you don’t want to feel uncomfortable, then don’t go there’
get somewhere, not just with these hashtags and declarations.”
Gainsbourg is in Reims rehearsing for her forthcoming European tour in support of Rest, her fifth album. Her partner is currently in Paris directing a play, while daughters Alice, 15, and Jo, six, remain in New York. Her son Ben, 20, works in a restaurant in Bath, drawn to the city by “falling in love with a French student there”.
Alice, she says, has never mentioned Lemon Incest to her, and she certainly won’t be pushing it on her. “I don’t want [my children] to feel uncomfortable. Also, of course, they can’t see Lars’s films.”
None the less, she admits that her son “had a rough time with Nymphomaniac” after the film’s release in 2013. “He’s OK now and we laugh about it. But sure, he resented me for doing that.”
She remains unsure whether the #Metoo mood will “take [in France] in the same way”, but she is certain that a new confusion abounds across countries and cultures, especially for the next generation. “I do have the impression it’s very hard for boys to know what to do, how to seduce a girl and the other way around also. It’ll be very touchy grounds.”
Were he here, no doubt her dad Serge would write a song about it. Je T’aime… #Metoo Non Plus, anyone?
Rest (Because Music) is out now. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays London’s Village Underground on March 29 and London Field Day festival on June 2