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| Français : Serge Gainsbourg par Claude Truong-Ngoc, 1981 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Serge Gainsbourg's grave, cimetière Montparnasse, Paris, France (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I have been spending quite a bit of time watching movies
and TV shows lately on Netflix, and I have to agree with those activists who
say Netflix threatens to become almost revolutionary in its effect on the public’s
viewing demands. For $8 a month one has
available hundreds and hundreds of what one might call “audio-visual” pieces,
some of which first saw the air many years ago, and others of almost
up-to-the-minute topicality.
For example, two of the best shows I have seen celebrate
the work of two wonderful popular singer-songwriters, both of whose lives have
given rise to complex stories that have
made marvellous television.
The two were, of
course, totally dissimilar. The first I saw was called “Searching for Sugarman”,
and told the remarkable tale of an American singer with Latin-American roots
called Rodriguez, who, when he first performed decades ago was almost totally
ignored by the American buying public, and was thought since then to have
declined into either an early death, or at least into total obscurity.
The second was a remarkable biography of the French
singer-songwriter, Serge Gainsbourg, who
for several decades strutted the stage of French popular music, and lived a
life that never had him far from the headlines. I remember him coming to
Montreal years ago, and being intrigued by the fact that he never appeared in
public except as an unshaven, untidy,
rough-looking but incorrigibly attractive person of whom one wondered
how he ever got to command a microphone. Throughout an era that boasted many
great names among its popular singers, names like Piaf, Greco, Aznavour,
Montand, Brel, Georges Brassens, Leo Ferré and many others, all of whom were
superb performers who gave us superb songs, Gainsbourg was an unclassifiable,
distinct presence who stood for --- well, probably no one knew quite what he
stood for, except probably for the free exercise of the human imagination.
As Wikipedia says of him: “His diverse artistic output…
embodied genres ranging from jazz, chanson, pop, yé yé, reggae, funk,
rock, electronic and disco….” Which
about says it all. In addition they add: “His lyrical work incorporated a vast
amount of clever word play to hoodwink the listener, often for humorous,
provocative, satirical or subversive reasons. Common types of word play in his
songs include mondegreen, onomatopoeia, rhyme, spoonerism, dysphemism,
araprosdokian, and pun.” A well known example is a song written for a
teenage girl singer who was under the impression she was singing about
lollipops, unaware for many years that the song had a double-meaning; the
enjoyment of giving someone fellatio.
Quite a character
was Serge Gainsbourg, and he was so well-known in Paris that the job of
representing his life on film must have been a daunting one. But I can report
that the film, called Serge Gainsbourg, a
Heroic Life, made by a comic strip author Joann Sfar, is a
triumph. Using all sorts of graphic effects, introducing particularly a
wonderful, engaging character as Gainsbourg’s Devil, Sfar and his superb cast,
headed with almost miraculous fidelity by Eric Elmosnino in the title role,
bring the whole thing off with a panache that matched Gainsbourg’s own attitude
to life.
I remember in the 1960s
when I was following the London stage that one day a young woman called Jane
Birkin appeared naked for a few moments in a cameo role in a West End play,
creating a stir in the newspapers the next day. Soon after, she auditioned for
a role in a play in Paris although she did not speak French, and in that she
starred alongside Gainsbourg, whose lover she became. Wikipeg\dia reports: “Birkin
remembers the beginning of her affair with Gainsbourg: he first took her to a
nightclub, then to a transvestite club and afterwards to the Hilton hotel,
where he passed out in a drunken stupor.” They had a relationship that lasted for 12 years. Birkin made a ceareer
for herself in Paris, where she still lives. She had a child with Gainsbourg,
who had children by two other women, and who is remembered for his affaires
with such celebrities as Juliette Greco and Brigitte Bardot (among others). All of this is dealt
with in the film, which does not shrink from portraying the singer as, in his
last days, a chronic drunk. He died in 1991 --- he was born in the month after
I was born in 1928 --- and it has to be said that his reputation as a
songwriter has soared since his death, so he is still fondly remembered equally
with more famous celebrities, many of whom he mocked mercilessly during his
lifetime.
The other
songwriter I mentioned, Rodriguez has also given rise to a film that has received
plaudits --- it won an Academy Award for best documentary one year --- although
some criticisms have been established about its point of view. Rodriguez, who
on the evidence of his film was indeed a singer-songwriter worthy of comparison
with Bob Dylan, for some strange reason became a hero to youth in apartheid
South Africa, and a few yeas ago, a group of these youths, grown to manhood,
decided to try to track down the man who had so influenced them. They had
collected many strange stories about his life, none of them confirmed, so one
thing they had to establish was when did he die and by what means. They had
some success in running down his work, which all confirmed his very high quality,
and advertised in American newspapers for more information, expecting to hear,
at the most, authentic stories of his death, They were much surprised when they
received a note from a woman saying she was Rodriguez’s daughter, and her
father was still alive. Staggered, the film-makers arranged for him to visit
South Africa and give a concert, which drew tens of thousands of people. Men
who worked with Rodriguez, who was making his living as a labourer, spoke in
awe of having herard that he was a star, singing before thousands, in some far
country.
Anyway, although
he was in his 70s by the time the film was made, these South Africans did
succeed in reviving the man’s career, or, at the very least, in drawing
international attention to a singer who appeared to have been forgotten years
before.
Except, some
people have pointed out that Rodriguez never really did abandon performing. He
had made several successful visits to Australia during the years he was
supposed to have been working in some menial job; and later he made several
visits to South Africa where he was greeted rapturously. These critics pointed
out many gaps in the story as told in the movie: for example, the question of
whether he did nor did not receive money for the earlier success of his records
in South Africa all those years ago was never adequately explained. The reason
given for these and other failures in the narrative was that the story was told
from the point of view of the South Africans whose purpose was to re-discover
their hero.
There is no doubt
at all that the man was, and is, a remarkable talent, and one supposes that today
he must be still performing, only to bigger audiences than ever before, in his
native country.
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