Jane Birkin was the elegant, delicate, heartstoppingly beautiful singer and movie star with a fascinatingly elusive and free-spirited screen presence. She was a performer with that interesting distinction of being Anglo-French, which somehow added to her unlocatable quality: she was quite at home with both languages, like other stars Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas and, indeed, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin’s daughter with Serge Gainsbourg.
It was her destiny to be thought of as a public figure and national treasure in France, where she made a great many films, and to be placed on an odd kind of pedestal as icon or 60s darling. She had been a fashion model in real life and played them on screen, like the ones in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, where she made her startling first proper screen impression. And yet this doesn’t do justice to her distinctive screen work, her later character roles and her tremendous capacity for creative friendship and collaboration with film-makers such as Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard.
Birkin’s sensational and notorious 1969 pop single with Serge, Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, with its moany-breathy coital vocals, in fact mutated interestingly into a provocative movie of the same name, released in 1976 and written and directed by Gainsbourg. It’s an essay on what might now be called queerness, with Birkin as the boyish Johnny, working in a cafe, who falls in love with a gay trucker, played by Warholian muse Joe Dallesandro, another performer who knew what it was like to be fetishised.
But Birkin really started out as the wide-eyed ingenue in the 1966 classic Blow-Up, who simpers at David Hemmings’s haughty photographer and trying unsuccessfully for a modelling gig. She was – again – a model in Joe Massot’s non-narrative swinging-60s groovefest Wonderwall in 1968, with its George Harrison soundtrack and a very Beatles-ish name for Birkin’s pert character, Penny Lane; she poses insouciantly for her boyfriend while being spied (and perved) on by her weirdo neighbour, played by Jack MacGowran. She was also considered to have burned a hole in the cinema screen as the enticingly innocent-fatale teenager Penelope, who sexily entrances Alain Delon’s moody, disenchanted writer by the shimmering pool on the Côte d’Azur in La Piscine – a role replayed by Dakota Johnson in Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash remake/rework.
In the 70s, Birkin worked with Roger Vadim, that other great French player and impresario of liberation, who directed her in his gender-flipped Don Juan of 1973; it is quirky, freaky and a bit preposterous, with Brigitte Bardot as the woman who believes herself to be the reincarnation of the great seducer, and Birkin as one of the women s/he seduces. In the same year, Birkin found herself in the cult giallo shocker Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye, directed by the prolific pulp-maestro Antonio Margheriti; it is set in a Hammerish Scottish castle, in which many creepy people are resident and a gorilla is kept in a cage.
In later years, Birkin was held in great regard by producers and directors as a class act, able to deliver finely judged small character roles, and her presence may often have been instrumental in cementing international coproduction financing. She made witty, poised contributions to two Agatha Christie movies: Death on the Nile in 1978 and Evil Under the Sun in 1982, both with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. In the late 90s, Birkin acted for James Ivory, playing the idiosyncratic Mrs Fortescue in A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, utilising Birkin’s always very patrician English accent.
But it was for the great directors of French cinema that she also did her most interesting work. In Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse (or The Beautiful Troublemaker), she plays the wife of Michel Piccoli’s painter Frenhofer, who had abandoned a painting he began 10 years before when Birkin was his model – but is then inspired to complete it, with a new model, the comely young Emmanuelle Béart. The film makes a shrewd and poignant comment on what Birkin must have experienced only too often: the extravagant condescension and fickle cynicism of being thought of as a “muse”.
Godard then gave Birkin a cameo in his freewheeling 1987 cine-triple-sketch Soigne Ta Droite, featuring, firstly, a wacky director (played by Godard himself) carrying the cans of his film around; secondly, the French pop group Les Rita Mitsouko recording a track; and, thirdly, three actors performing a variation on the fable The Grasshopper and the Ant, with Birkin as a hedonistic young woman zooming around with her lover in a convertible. Birkin spoke with humour and generosity about the bizarre experience of being directed by Godard on his most cantankerous and difficult form.
But the director who was most passionately committed to Birkin as a real screen presence, and who believed in her in a way that most of the industry didn’t, had to be Agnès Varda, who constructed one of her wittiest and most playful reveries around Birkin: Jane B par Agnès V was a 1988 docudrama that was an “imaginary biopic”. It is a surreal kaleidoscope of images and personae, imagined and curated with real love and veneration by Varda.
Perhaps it was impossible to capture exactly what Jane Birkin was to the French and to everyone else, but Varda came closest. Birkin was a unique, beguiling and energising force in music and movies.
