Charlotte Gainsbourg's speaking voice is one of the strangest around: reedy and fluting in a way that can only be described as Mitford-esque. Her sentences are measured and precise, as if she's always thinking about punctuation. Even though she grew up in Paris, and still lives there, she doesn't seem to have a trace of a French accent. You could easily be fooled into thinking that here was an impressively bilingual individual, a perfect exemplar of Eurotunnel culture. But Gainsbourg isn't having it. "Always when I'm speaking English, it's like I'm pretending to be fluent. I don't feel fluent at all." This comes out in textbook-perfect English, of course.
It's a pertinent point because in her latest film Gainsbourg is, once again, playing an Englishwoman. In past years she's played Jane Eyre - a perfectly appropriate use of her spectrally weird voice and otherworldly screen presence - and the incestuous sister Julie in an adaptation of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden. In Nuovomondo (aka The Golden Door), she's back doing the Jane Eyre thing, playing a turn-of-the-century Englishwoman with a secret sorrow, taking passage on a ship filled with Italian peasants.
Does playing English bring out her English side, I ask. "I'm French," she says. "I'm much more comfortable speaking French. It's easier to express myself in French. I'm not looking for words; it's much more natural."
Gainsbourg is, of course, possibly the most famous half-French, half-English person in the world. Born in London, she is the only offspring of professional provocateur Serge Gainsbourg and socialite-cum-actress Jane Birkin. Still only 35, she has been a bona fide film star in France for more than 20 years, made a couple of pretty decent records, been shot by legions of fashion photographers, and had two children. More significantly, perhaps, she was the subject of sustained, and very public, adulation from her father (who died in 1991) during early adolescence, culminating in their 1986 duet on a song called Lemon Incest. It appeared on an album he wrote for her entitled (with characteristic reticence) Charlotte for Ever. (The video, in which she and her father snuggle up on a king-size bed with black satin sheets, is an object lesson in edge-of-legality queasiness.) Gainsbourg pere also wrote and directed a film called Charlotte for Ever at the same time; 15-year-old Charlotte was required to do a nude scene.
These days, in spite of it all, Gainsbourg looks surprisingly normal. In blue jeans and combat jacket, she smokes her way through one cigarette after another, even though she claims she's giving up. She's also very careful with her words: as much, perhaps, because of her nervousness with the language as to do with her complicated upbringing. At first, she says, she made all her films in her school holidays. Then came art college. She dropped out quickly to start an acting career in earnest. "It was only then I thought: right, I'm going to be an actress." Largely due to her father's tireless idolatry, she made her mark quickly (she played the lead in L'Effrontee, her first significant film, aged 13) but found it more difficult to turn acting into a career. "I was always doing something," she says, "but it was much slower than I expected. Nothing was really happening. I was never a workaholic; I was doing one film a year, quite slow. Then with My Wife Is an Actress, I stepped out of something. I don't know how to explain it. It happened with that film."
Indeed it did. My Wife Is an Actress, written and directed by Yvan Attal (an actor, with whom she has had two children), triggered a curious transition she underwent five years back, almost without anyone noticing. It was a career hinge. Up until My Wife, whether she knew it or not, the timid but apparently pliable Gainsbourg had the dubious honor of being the muse to one older man after another. Her father was just the first. Claude Miller, who had put her in L'Effrontee, then put her in La Petite Voleuse; David Bailey cast her in his feature film debut, The Intruder; Franco Zeffirelli cast her as Jane Eyre. The Cement Garden simply reinforced the not-entirely-wholesome atmosphere that surrounded her. Not for nothing did that connoisseur of transgressiveness, Madonna, heist a sample of Gainsbourg's dialogue from The Cement Garden as the spoken intro to What It Feels Like for a Girl.
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All that passivity seemed to vanish overnight. "Back then," she says, "I was less ... voluntaire. I mean, not really doing anything to make things happen. I was waiting around a lot, and moaning a lot. When Yvan, my boyfriend, wrote My Wife, he wrote a different character for me. He wanted to show me in a different way. Maybe people watching this film and seeing a different character opened things up." Attal, whom she met on the set of Autobus in 1990, developed My Wife Is an Actress as a riff on the pressures that the secretive Gainsbourg faced from the public, her family and the media.
In response to My Wife, Gainsbourg has become a lot more voluntaire. Instead of opting for the safe-hands surrogate father figures, she has yoked herself to some of international cinema's more exciting talent. Hard on My Wife's heels came a small role in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's 21 Grams, then a somewhat bigger one in Lemming, directed by Dominik Moll. This was capped by a lead role in The Science of Sleep, the creation of the undisputed leader of France's newest wave, Michel Gondry. And it's the same impulse that has seen her join with Emanuele Crialese for Nuovomondo (whose UK title, The Golden Door, is presumably to avoid confusion with Terrence Malick's The New World), and Todd Haynes, in his just-shot Bob Dylan biopic. Cinematically speaking, Gainsbourg hasn't been this fashionable for years.
Perhaps it also explains her increasing confidence in the recording studio. As with her films, it helps to have powerful back-up - Air, Jarvis Cocker, Neil Hannon and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich all worked on last year's album, 5:55 - but you can tell immediately that music is something she likes talking about. She even starts talking about her father - a subject that had been deemed off-limits. "It was a very important step for me, in itself," she says. "I did my first album with my father, 20 years ago. I thought I would never do anything without him. There was no point, it would never happen. And then with time I gradually wanted to do something again. I didn't know how, or with who. I knew I couldn't do anything on my own. So when I met Air, it all became possible."
She wouldn't sing in French, she says. "I told them, it's too heavy for me, because of my father." By now, Gainsbourg is positively voluble. "The whole process lasted more than a year. I was able to go into a studio with them, see them work, I was there every day. Sometimes I didn't have anything to do, because the words weren't written yet. It was like a workshop. And being able to be there and talk about what I wanted to talk about, and try to write lyrics ... well, I did try, but it didn't work out. I did manage to write a little piece which Jarvis made into the last song, Morning Song."
There's no stopping her now. I wouldn't know if it's big news, but it seems, despite a reputation for terminal shyness, she is thinking about singing live. "People have asked me to. I thought that I wouldn't like it, but then Air are doing their concerts all over the world at the moment, and I went with them for four shows. It was quite terrifying. I only did two songs. I got a glimpse of what it could be, and I don't think I was very good, but I wasn't disgusted by it. I thought, maybe with a bit more work on my side I could do something."
More philosophizing follows. I ask whether she finds making music more rewarding. "It's true: music is much more personal. But in acting there's a great deal of pleasure in speaking someone else's words. You put a lot of yourself into a film: you have to base everything on who you are and who you know. The two are very separate for me. That's the joy of it: of being able to go from a recording studio to a film set. There's no link."
Will she do another album? "It was such a perfect thing for me, the perfect crew, with Jarvis - so I don't want it to be the last one. But it's difficult for me to know what I want to do."
That, you sense, is something she runs up against pretty often these days; she must be spoiled for choice now. Sadly, though, there are no more Gauloise-fogged insights to be had; it's time to leave. But there's a coda: at the Cannes film festival, I stumbled into the premiere of her mother's autobiographical film, Boites (Boxes). Jane Birkin plays her lightly fictionalized self, and it's easy to spot the Serge and Charlotte simulacra. Birkin doesn't hide the fact that she considers her split with Gainsbourg the biggest mistake of her life, and tells her middle daughter, here called Camille: "You're everything I wanted to be, only prettier!" (If the internal politics of the Birkin family couldn't get any knottier, Camille - written as a curious mixture of attention-seeking and self-effacement - is played by Gainsbourg's half-sister, Lou Doillon.) But Boites clears up one outstanding mystery. The first time Jane opens her mouth, everything becomes clear. That's where Charlotte gets her surreally plummy English accent from. We can all sleep a little easier now.
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