Salaud Days – Gainsbourg

The natural conclusion of pop music was the reality singing contest, as the singing show manages to hold at once two opposing ideas about pop music that help pop music sell: it is something we can all aspire to do, yet it is only truly done by persons with a certain something that we lack. In the end, it is easier to let them entertain us than to entertain ourselves. It is capitalism’s ‘economics of scale’: stars have a bigger talent than we do, so they can produce great performances at cheaper cost of effort.

Musical biopics often try to balance the same two ideas: they must present the musician as being both an ordinary person and a genius. If they do not have an ordinary life, we couldn’t identify with them; if they are not a genius, we wouldn’t want to. As a result, the writer attempts to hang the one on the other; from a single life event, the ordinary guy or girl is tipped into brilliance:- Mr. Charles loses a brother, Ms. Piaf is tragically poor. The life event is never hours and hours of practice, unless one has a father like Mr. Helfgott.

At the beginning of Gainsbourg, we see the eponymous M. practicing at the piano, although, thankfully, he seems, in time, to have a perfectly good relationship with his parents. Perhaps it is down to playing Chopin rather than Rachmaninov; it’s easier. As he grows older, it seems that even the Nazis don’t faze him. His only concern is his perceived ugliness and, surely, this cannot be the cause of his greatness, can it? No, because there he is practising again. And painting too. Always, frequently, mostly painting. And playing piano. And smoking. He honed everything to perfection.

While we wait for the tragic event to set him on the right path, we are introduced to La Gueule, M. Gainsbourg’s imaginary, rat-faced counterpart. He is the embodiment, all at once, of M. Gainbourg’s insecurity about his mug and the difficult decision between following his love of music and his love of art. He chides the musician, challenging him, arguing with him, and critiquing the value of his work. Not, of course, in the traditional method of the pathetic fallacy that peddles the fallacy of one’s being pathetic: even the imaginary rat knows that Serge’s songs and paintings are good; he just wants him to go where the money is.

By splitting M. Gainsbourg into himself and an alter-ego, the film becomes about the on-going conflict, not the event. The complete character is not the result of one or a series of events, but a tugging and pulling between a number of desires, fears, and arguments. In I’m Not There, Mr. Dylan is the sum of six different characters and, in 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, the pianist is fragmented into 32 equal parts. In comparison, M. Gainsbourg seems much simpler and, as a result, the internal conflict can be made to fit into a narrative of sorts, sparing the film from an overreaching artiness.

La Gueule sets M. Gainsbourg’s paintings alight and, as a result of this interference, M. Gainsbourg sells out: discovered first by M. Vian (in a wonderful cameo by M. Katerine, culminating in a medley of Vian’s Je Bois with Intoxicated Man), he sells songs to the comedy vocal quartet Les Frères Jacques, and is finally invited to present to Ms. Greco, which is like being asked to write songs for Elizabeth Taylor, if Elizabeth Taylor was a doctor of philosophy who had slept with Miles Davies. And so, with Ms. Mouglalis, begins a succession of beautiful actresses, most of whom cannot sing, played by a succession of beautiful actresses, most of whom cannot sing: Ms. Gall, Ms. Bardot, and, of course, Ms. Birkin.

Such a film must lack tension, as even the least-informed knows that some of these beautiful women will sing his songs, there would be no film otherwise. The interest lies in that first half, when M. Gainsbourg’s insecurities wear him down into acquiescence. However, once he attains success, the conflict is resolved. The lesson we could all learn is this: become successful and one can do what one wants. Through his songs, he is granted the notoriety and resources to be a painter, a director, and a novelist. Only the successful are granted this luxury: M. Safr, the debutant director of the film, for example, was the successful writer/artist of the graphic novel on which it is based.

Sadly, we do not get to see M. Gainsbourg get it all in quite this way. Once the conflict is resolved – partly by conceding to La Gueule and partly because achievement makes such a conflict void – the film changes pace, turning into a rush to include every charming, cultural anecdote about the man that there is. On a Parisian street, he tells La Gueule never to return, as he doesn’t need him anymore. At this point, perhaps, he becomes La Gueule himself, employing the same techniques that The Mouth had used to provoke him to action to provoke others: he drunkenly gets a police escort to speed him, sirens blazing, to a concert; he records a reggae version of La Marseillaise; he destroys his relationship with Ms. Birkin.

There are, of course, too many such stories to fit into the film. There is no mention of Lemon Incest, the controversial single recorded with his 13 year-old daughter, nor of the famed televised incidents where he burned a 500 Franc note or propositioned Ms. Houston. Neither is there, as a counterbalance, any representation of his famed generosity to the French public (at one point, paying to have all of a taxi driver’s teeth replaced) or the general love with which he was held. This is not a malicious omission, as it is a French film made for the French market, where, surely, almost all of M. Gainsbourg’s life must be part of common knowledge. Thus, for example, when Ms. Birkin tells him in hospital that he can now work on the symphonic masterpiece of which he’d always dreamed, the audience must know she means Histoire de Melody Nelson and it need never be mentioned again; a few seconds of Melody later in the film is the only second-thought it receives.

However, for an English-speaking audience that may not be so well-acquainted with his work, the talk of a long-considered magnum opus may sound like both motivation and a plot-point. If it does not materialise, it could be a little confusing. Similarly, when Gainsbourg suggests to M. Gall that he write the 18 year-old a dirty song, we never hear Les Sucettes, the song that would cause such controversy. To some, of course, there is no need to. In a film about the early days of the Beatles, Mr. Lennon might say “Gee, Paul, wouldn’t it be great if there were no possessions. Think about it.” and we would know all that that entailed.

As an introduction to M. Gainsbourg, it presumes too much and says too little. It focuses both too much and too little on his latter days, the days of being a bastard. Those days must be there, because they are what people know of him, but to did with them so quickly creates a film that is lop-sided: languorous and thoughtfully in the beginning and, then, racing through to the end, as if slightly embarrassed by its drunken, inappropriate protagonist. The beginning is a conflict worth telling: how one can aim for success in art or successful art or how, in reality, the two can merge. This is theme beneath that makes M. Gainsbourg’s music so precisely ambiguous, not the inflammatory amorality or provocative games he frequently played on top.