the audience applauded

Simply A Masterpiece

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Lucien 'Serge' Ginsburg is an odd-looking imaginative Jewish boy. In Nazi-occupied Paris, he is the first to get the yellow star of David before the office even opens. His unrelenting flirting charms the ladies despite his young age. After the war, he played piano like his father and later gained success with his original songs. There are his many loves, a short affair with Brigitte Bardot, and a longer one with Jane Birkin. Jane becomes the mother of Charlotte Gainsbourg. Through it all, there is always the surreal figure of a caricature Serge.I don't know anything about Serge Ginsburg. His childhood seems interesting and got me locked in during the first act. His turn into adulthood is less compelling and his life story becomes messier and messier. His love life may be interesting for dropping the Bardot name. The surreal character is interesting at first but the movie does become chaotic.

This is an outstandingly original film.The performances across the board are superb, the story, for all it's wildly tangential aesthetics engages and often grips.But most of all, its dark exuberance makes it oddly joyful driving the viewer open to it into Gainsbourgs' frame of mind. Imaginative use (SPOILER ALERT) of his haunting if surreal alter ego. In fact this overtly comic-like and "unreal" wilful cipher for Gainsbourg trumps the great risk of turning the picture into farce, and instead brings us closer to the humanity, inner conflict and creative insights of the artist in evolution.I strongly recommend it.

Based on a graphic novel by the director (Joann Sfar), 'Gainsbourg' charts the tumultuous life of Lucien Ginsberg, the precocious son of Russian-born Jews (who settled in Paris at the time of Germany's occupation of France), who gained fame and notoriety for his music, muses and mercurialness.Played with remarkable confidence by Kacey Mottet Klein, the young Ginsburg passes through school smoking and drawing lewd pictures of the female models he adores, and intellectually evading Nazi wrath (he pretends he is friends with Goebbles to avoid wearing the yellow star).His skill as a lyricist and pianist is recognised and he is given his new persona: Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino). His fame quickly skyrockets as does his appeal to famous ladies of the 1960s: Brigitte Bardot (a sultry Laetitia Casta), the bohemian Juliette Gréco (Anna Mouglalis, fresh from her role as Coco Chanel) and the English singer/actress, Jane Birkin (Lucy Gordon, who tragically committed suicide before the film's release).At various points in the film Gainsbourg is joined by La Gueule ('The Mug'), his alter ego and everything he is not: daring, debonair, devil-may-care. Although I was intrigued by this peculiar, gangly figure, whose ears are emphasised and whose nose is ridiculously long and aquiline (a reference to Ginsberg's insecurity), the surrealism of this character seemed to detract from Elmosnino's performance and therefore quickly seemed bathetic. This is Sfar's first stab as a director, so he was bound to make dubious judgements. The biggest one was casting Elmosnino as the lead. The part is too big for him. There's a very claustrophobic atmosphere and interiors are generally only partly shown, which is perhaps a reflection of Gainsbourg's insularity.When I read about how influential Serge Gainsbourg was, how many genres he experimented with and what inspired him to pen and feature in the famously lascivious song, 'Je t'aime… moi non plus' ('I love you... me neither'), I thought I was in for a real treat. Watch this film and you may come away thinking the man was nothing but a self-effacing, odd- looking, quasi-talented musician who was prone to unexpected blubbering and who was liked, bizarrely, for those qualities which he himself was insecure about.www.scottishreview.net

'Gainsbourg' is both a natural history of the man portrayed and the idea of the man. The brilliant use of creature effects in the make-up of Doug Jones - 'Pan' from 'Pan's Labyrinth' is a multi-layered touch, not enforcing an opinion of Serge upon the audience as such a trick might, but illustrating several things Gainsbourg triumphed over. All of these were his "self". He embraced and made his own the negative and positive appraisals people made of him, could deflect his enemies as well as magnetise friends and lovers. There were many lovers.Bardot is present and accounted for and her portrayal here does little to shift the notion that she was a muse for artists who lusted after her rather than be a truly great artist herself. A panoply of women passed through Gainsbourg's bed linen, but it is his soul mate, Jane Birkin, who provides the beating heart of the film.Portrayed almost chillingly by the late British actress Lucy Gordon, Birkin is first portrayed as the eternal little girl found and nurtured into womanhood by Gainsbourg - with all the ponderous ambiguity that entails - only to become the "adult" in the relationship, she realizing that Gainsbourg's talent, gift and curse was that he was an eternal little boy. His years basking in his legendary status in the 1980s, for which he was repudiated and gained another reputation outside France as a "dirty old man" (ask Whitney Houston... no, he apologised for that on the same chat show though that apology is rarely seen) retain the wistful whimsy of the former half of the film, but do seem a touch like an afterthought. Overall you are left with the sense that this was a man who lived, who was a misogynist who prized women, an artist whose upbringing was comfortable yet whose spirit could play the scale of emotions on heart strings; whose very charisma could melt his enemies' ire.If 'Initial BB' doesn't become the new French national anthem by the end of the year I will be disappointed.