Charlotte Gainsbourg, Lou Doillon and many personalities paid tribute to the singer and actress during a ceremony broadcast live in the streets of Paris.
It is barely nine o’clock in the morning and already the voice of Jane Birkin and her most emblematic songs resound in the streets of the first arrondissement of Paris. On a giant screen installed near the Saint-Roch church, the “artists’ parish”, a giant screen displays a snapshot in black and white. The artist displays his eternal smile, the one we all know him, between sweetness and modesty tinged with a hint of anxiety. His relatives, many personalities from the world of culture and as many onlookers gathered in the church to pay him a last tribute. Like Jane Birkin, the funeral ceremony, broadcast live, was bilingual.
Read alsoJane Birkin, muse of Gainsbourg and symbol of the sixties, is dead
“Jane Birkin is our generation, the whole story of our youth”is moved Jean-Michel, a retiree on vacation in Paris, who has come to pay a last tribute to the icon. “We came to pay him a small discreet tribute”, entrusts his wife to his side. Dozens of people are gradually massing behind the interminable barriers erected over the entire width of the rue des Pyramides. The neighborhood, cordoned off by the police, only lives to pay homage to Birkin.
“A Free Woman”
“I came to pay homage to himconfides a restaurateur who served Jane Birkin while she still had an establishment on the Côte d’Azur. He was a really endearing personality.” In the crowd, a few people hold up posters «Jane Forever». Another says “Thank you Jane Birkin” for her commitment alongside persecuted women in Iran. “It was an opportunity to say goodbye to him, add, a few meters away, two retired friends. She was an icon of our generation, a free woman.”
The crowd is silent and serious when the first notes of Running away from happiness lest it run awaythe singer’s emblematic song, taken from her album Baby Alone in Babylon. On the screen appear the personalities who have come to pay homage, greeted by applause: José Garcia, Vanessa Paradis, Maiwenn, Benjamin Biolay, Clare Mastroianni et Catherine Deneuve for the world of cinema. Little by little, the forecourt of the Saint-Roch church is covered with wreaths of white flowers.
An Anglican pastor speaks. She had been chosen by Birkin to bury his daughter who died in 2013, photographer Kate Barry. The actress’s grandchildren light candles that they place around the coffin. The pastor salutes the politicians who have come to pay tribute to the artist, starting with Brigitte Macron and Culture Minister Rima Abdul-Malak. “It says a lot about what Jane Birkin was for Franceshe judges. To love a country is to be able to love several.
“My mom, our mom”
Her voice choked by sobs, Charlotte Gainsbourg evokes the mythical couple formed by her parents. “I thank my father for having loved my mother so much and my mother for having loved my father so much, she says. I find myself an orphan, I see all your souls in pain without her. I can already see the void she leaves us. She’s my mom, she’s our mom.”
Sa cadet, singer Lou Doillontestifies to all the significant episodes of her life alongside this whimsical and generous mother. “There’s you getting on the motorbike that starts up without asking Andrew where the brakes are and smashing into the wall with your broken leg, writhing in pain and laughing in your brother’s arms. There is the diamond that you inadvertently dumped in a box of Lexo in the trash can of your room and which we find years later in Brittany because you had forgotten to empty the trash cans…” “Mom, thank you for all these adventures, thank you for not being ordinary, reasonable or docile. This world of tomorrow, very peaceful and reasoned, it already annoys me”, she adds.
The testimonies keep coming. Olivier Gluzman, her manager, whom the singer called every day? “Breaking the phone call record from a Jewish mother is no small feat,” he jokes. The writer Olivier Rolin, her former companion, met in Sarajevo, who first took her for a “slightly futile singer” before falling totally in love “like all French soldiers” present on site. “Tarzan”, the doctor who accompanied Birkin since his stroke in 2021, tells a warm woman, “who ridiculed us with the students and who was right”, because she was still going on concert tours again after being hospitalized for several days. If the singer succumbed after having fought for a long time against the disease, her music, eternal, will continue to accompany her fans and her loved ones. Moreover, it still resounds in the streets.
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2023-07-24 14:22:13
#Mom #ordinary #emotion #gratitude #Jane #Birkins #funeral
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