Charlotte Gainsbourg: “Everything collapsed”

She is featured in Benoît Jacquot’s latest film, Suzanna Andler, inspired by a play by Marguerite Duras, which will be released in theaters on January 31st. In the role of this married woman who must choose between her comfortable but boring life and the adventure embodied by her young lover, Charlotte Gainsbourg is magnificent, more on edge than ever. As if inhabited by the memory of this friend, who “let go” a few weeks before the start of filming. This man of the theater, the actress had met in 2007, while playing for Todd Haynes in I’m Not There. It was he who had made her work on her role, a collaboration so fruitful that it had never ceased since. Unfortunately, cancer took away this genius repeater, leaving Charlotte devastated.

“I was terrified of not knowing my lines. Not to get there. I have such a bad memory ”, she confides in the long interview that she has just granted to Vanity Fair. However, in homage to the absent one, she hangs on. For two months, she works, alone, this role where she bares her heart. Repeating each line, with the voice of the deceased in his head. “I kept wondering what he would have said about such and such a scene, what he would have answered to such and such of my questions,” she explains. An astonishing lack of confidence on the part of an artist who “fell into it” when she was very young …

She was only 14 when the public discovered her in L’Effrontée by Claude Miller. At the time, acting was still only cinema, as she laughs at: “I brought up tears when I thought of my father’s death, when he was not dead. Did she feel secretly guilty when on March 2, 1991, reality caught her imagination? The disappearance of Serge Gainsbourg, at the age of 62, plunged her into an abyss from which she never quite recovered. With this father, this hero, she had shared so much, so dared.

For her, he wrote in 1984, Lemon Incest, which they will sing in duet, then two years later the album Charlotte For Ever. She does not hesitate for a second to put her childish voice on these provocative words, as she will then confide: “I did that for him. To be with him. “

How to survive him? For years, Charlotte believed that she would not make it. “After her death, everything fell apart for a very long time,” she recalls. She wallows in silence, acts as if Serge was still there. His absence is all the more unbearable to him since everything reminds him of it. On the radio, on television, in the evenings, his songs are broadcast everywhere.

Her meeting with Yvan Attal, shortly after this tragedy, saves her. However, this love, however great it is, does not erase the misfortune that continues to crush her heart. “He had the patience to wait … I don’t know, ten years, that I emerge”, she admitted in 2013, still in Vanity Fair.

The birth of their first son, Ben, in 1997, will be a trigger. With her little boy, she learns to smile again, to feel what she had previously forbidden herself, joy. Alice, in 2002, then Joe, in 2011, come to enlarge the family and to comfort Charlotte in the idea that she can be happy. But grief is never far away, probably because she still hasn’t mourned Serge. Even today, it is impossible for him to listen to his songs. Not long ago, she surprised her children playing a record of their grandfather. “I walked into the room, I listened, barely two seconds,” she says.

She was older, and arguably more armed, to face a new drama: the death by defenestration of her half-sister, photographer Kate Barry, on December 11, 2013. This death – Charlotte hates the word death, which she says is used for hide the truth – she has spoken a lot about it with her mother, Jane Birkin, her other half-sister, Lou Doillon, and those close to her. Above all, she leaves Paris, where Kate lived, for New York. It was there that in 2017, she recorded Rest, an album tribute to his dear departed …

In America, she reconnects with one of her youthful passions, photography. As a child, she developed her own pictures on her own. A magical memory. And then Kate became a photographer, and Charlotte no longer used her camera. In New York, she rediscovers the desire to capture the image on the spot, the city, the cemetery, the adorable bull terrier she has just adopted. It’s like a thread that connects her to her sister.

Last March, she was severely affected by the coronavirus which ravages the Big Apple. Thirty-five days in bed, from which she gets up with only one idea in mind: to return to France. It is there that today, she put down her suitcases. For a moment, it seems, even if the recent events which have shaken the country, the terrorist assassination of history professor Samuel Paty, the threat of an unprecedented social crisis, frightens him. If for years she has fled “happiness for fear that it might escape”, she seems, at 49, finally resolved to enjoy every minute of life …

Lili CHABLIS

–