I know about the iconic bag, the iconic basket, the iconic bangs, the iconic partnership with the iconic Serge Gainsbourg, and that iconic---if curiously pointless---song, "J'Taime", but I'd never before seen Serge and Jane in action during their glory years. I was too busy being six in Oakland CA in 1969 to care much one way or the other about stylish French people.
Well, it's true.
Then, one day, during a trawl of YouTube I happened upon Slogan, a film Jane and Serge made during the late 1960s. What I saw kind of made me---and still makes me---a tad sick.
Jane looks like nothing so much as a victim of exploitation. Told she is proving herself a free and strong exemplar of the liberated woman as long as she's willing to "SHOW US YOUR TITS!!!!" she's sucked into presenting herself in the time honored porn fantasy of a happy and willing sexual devotee of Gainsbourg the creepily sophisticated older man who awakens the lubricious desires of and innocent girl and who has only to lay back and enjoy the sexual thrall in which she is held.
It's the whole sexual Svengali thing that fuels sites like Barely Legal, the dream of someone so innocent you can mold them into your own personal---well, let's just be frank and call it what it is---fuck toy.
I know nothing about their relationship off screen. I do know that Jane seems to have adored Gainsbourg and that the two of them never married. From what I have learned I gather that most of Jane's fame came about due to the sexual cause celebre of Jane's heavy breathing, orgasm simulating (and banned from radio play in the UK, Italy & Spain) "J'Taime" and her link to Gainsbourg who is a revered cultural figure in France.
It's hard to miss the fact that her singing in a slightly screechy mouse-like register, and her acting, which depended far more upon her photogenic features and willingness to be filmed topless than on her ability to emote weren't exactly the type to get her enshrined beside Dusty Springfield or Vanessa Redgrave as a talent to be reckoned with.
Her subsequent career seems largely based upon nostalgia for the happy, golden years of the swinging 60s, her Gainsbourg connection and the fact that she was a very, very pretty girl who wore the styles of the era with panache.
I still find her pleasing to look at and I admire her ability to wear the styles of her youth but I find the whole "star struck girl---and Jane was NEVER presented as a Woman, as was...oh say Sophia Loren...see what I mean?---who kneels at the feet of genius male and keeps his attention with perky tits and a willingness to make him look like a winner by willingly displaying said tits at his command a bit sad, and kind of cringe making.
Gainsbourg was a provocateur and Jane his possibly willing accomplice but I couldn't help but get the feeling from Slogan, and from things Jane has said in interviews over the years, that she was simply a young, coltish girl from a proper middle-class English background. A girl with bang-framed doe eyes who was willing to do whatever it took to make the man she was desperately in love with love her back and keep her in his life.
Stylish or not, it just all seems kind of sad and tawdry. I freely admit I know nothing about these people other than what I've seen so I could be way off but after seeing Slogan I felt a bit dirty.
I like Jane Birkin, and it just doesn't look as if she was so much loved in return as pimped out.
