Thirty-four years later Jane B. by Agnès.V, delicious portrait of Jane Birkin by Agnès Varda in 1988, the favorite English artist of the French is once again portrayed, this time by her daughter.
Jane by Charlotte is the first film by director Charlotte Gainsbourg, an intimate documentary, crossed by ghosts, mother and daughter leafing through a family album, where the modesty of feelings, the need to express filial and maternal love tend towards the universal.
“As in Agnès Varda’s film, it’s as much a film about Charlotte as it is about me.”
Jane Birkinat franceinfo
Yellowed photos, vacation films, objects full of memories that Jane Birkin keeps like relics, and an almost religious visit to rue de Verneuil, Serge’s house where Charlotte grew up.
The film allows the mother and the daughter to say to each other what they had not dared to say to each other. There is in Jane by Charlotte this tenderness, pressed by the passage of time, because death is approached there without fear, that of Serge Gainsbourg and that of Kate, first daughter of Jane.
The director has the ambition to treat a subject already worked by masterpieces like Mr Klein Where The Last Metro, no small feat. In occupied Paris in 1942, Monsieur Haffmann, Daniel Auteuil, a Jewish jeweler, failed to flee with his family.
Stuck at home, he makes a deal with his employee, Gilles Lellouche, who moves in with his wife, Sara Giraudeau, in the shop and the apartment, and hides his boss in the cellar, promising to return everything when the war comes. will be over.
“This character is so banal, another roars within him.”
Gilles Lelloucheat franceinfo
In this oppressive huis-clos, the new master of the place, full of complexes, does not take long to reveal his true nature, that of a bastard. If the film has trouble keeping its promise, the trio of actors is irreproachable, and Gilles Lellouche evokes the cohabitation, not obvious, with his character.
Here is a first film whose author launches into social comedy, on the strength of his experience as a co-screenwriter of Tuche and his background as a social educator. Elias, Shaïn Boumedine, noticed in Mektoub, my love by Abdellatif Kechiche, is a young suburbanite who stupidly fails the Sciences Po competition for forgetting his identity card. To earn a living, he goes to work in a reception center for placed minors.
Faced with these endearing and untenable teenagers, whose life paths are already chaotic, he discovers a harsh reality, but gradually acquires a taste for making himself useful, despite recurring failures and the glaring lack of means. Placed has a lot of clumsiness, facilities, but this band of young non-professional actors really makes you want to believe that their characters will get by.