Jane Birkin: muse, style icon, actress, singer and mother. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s directorial debut constructs a personal portrait that beautifully illustrates the intricate layers of a mother-daughter bond in a documentary film.
It’s important to know that Jane Birkin made a documentary in 1988 with Agnès Varda when she turned 40 – a milestone birthday and its 99 minutes duration explores the types of character roles Jane didn’t get perform. A film of many layers, I wrote about this in Conversations in Jane B. par Agnès V.
Just like Jane B. par Agnès V., Gainsbourg’s self-made documentary has many parallel themes that make it a great follow-up documentary. Filmed only just before and after the Covid-19 pandemic, Jane by Charlotte brings with it a sense of symbolic continuity of a Jane Birkin as it captures her in the final phase of her life in her 70s, living with a cancer diagnosis and reflecting on her life after suffering a number of instances of personal tragedy.
Although we see Birkin and project her as the actress and icon, the intergenerational conversations with her daughter is completely honest and vulnerable. As the film goes on, we also witness a transformation in Gainsbourg who, was a similar age to Birkin in the first documentary by Varda. Quiet, thoughtful and concerned, she’s making sense of her role as a daughter and we see her developing some understanding of her role in her relationship with her mother. This kind of intimacy that is so natural could only be achievable with simplicity, and Gainsbourg’s limited filming equipment and DIY footage delivers this sense of anxiety of death and nostalgia juxtaposed in a time where the world was silent and stricken by a global pandemic.
As the documentary about Jane Birkin explores conversational themes of life, death, family and tragedy – this film reveals more about Charlotte Gainsbourg. The distance between her and her mother due to living in different countries, and the looming fear of Birkin’s health drives this urgent sense of Gainsbourg needing to be close with her mother. This feeling appears during be beautiful moment where the pair enter Serge Gainsbourg’s house in Paris, compulsively left as it was by Charlotte when he passed away in 1991, because it was all that she had to remind herself of him.
Whether you choose to watch Jane by Charlotte to see Jane Birkin’s final appearance in a film or to observe Charlotte Gainsbourg’s film debut, this documentary poetically explores the fears of an adult who tries to connect the distance between their dying mother who is prepared to say goodbye.
Nadia Cheung 