Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life: Grade B

B
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life

Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, Doug Jones; Writer-Director Joann Sfar (French, subtitled)

Serge Gainsbourg was a pop singer-songwriter in France who enjoyed enormous fame in the mid 1960’s. Though virtually unknown in America today, this biopic is worth seeing because it is a visual feast, an auditory feast, and an acting feast.

Writer-Director Joann Sfar is a creator of comic books (or “graphic novels,” as they are reverently known) and his uninhibited, surrealistic visual sensibility dominates the film, especially in the first half, which covers the childhood of Lucien Ginsberg (real name) in Nazi-occupied Paris. The boy’s alter-ego is a huge balloon with tiny arms and legs, that follows him around, mocking his self-image as an ugly kid, and his Jewishness. The anti-semitism of the Vichy regime is noted, but the story line is really about the boy’s irreverent, iconoclastic, precocious, artistic soul, as he develops his talent as a painter. At times, his alter-ego is represented by an animated figure that swoops around Paris. These early scenes get an A+ for creativity and visual attractiveness.

But it is nominally a biography, so the boy becomes a man (suddenly, without incident), a piano player and song-writer who works sleazy bars and hopes to succeed as a painter. His alter-ego is now played, wonderfully, by a costumed icon with huge nose and ears (Jones), who follows him around and seems to represent his grounding, his center, who he really is (in his mind). Gainsbourg (the adult stage name) is played brilliantly by the relatively unknown actor Elmosnino. His presentation, always through a blue cloud of Gauloises smoke, is simply eye-gripping. In his own voice he sings in the style of ‘60’s chanson, and the songs are great. He cavorts with multiple women, including Bridget Bardot, wonderfully played by Casta, a sensation in her own right. He performs a fabulous reggae version of the Marseillaise, and as he becomes a huge star, also becomes a drunken fool who loses his compass.

During the last half of the film, the visual creativity that was so stunning earlier, fades, and the movie focuses on the psychological development of the artist as he loses his center but never despairs that, though others around him do. The last half runs far too long and dwells too closely, without insight, on basically an unattractive person, diminishing the overall effectiveness of the movie. Nevertheless the film is a work of art worth seeking out.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: Grade B

B

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

Werner Herzog, Dominique Baffier, Jean Clottes, Jean-Michel Geneste; Writer-Director Werner Herzog.

Iconic director Herzog somehow gained permission from the French government to film the painted walls inside the famous prehistoric Chauvet cave discovered in southern France in 1994. This 3D documentary is stunning as a technical achievement and because of the cave drawings themselves. The drawings and etchings on the cave walls were made by humans living at the end of the ice age, about 32,000 years ago. There are horses, reindeer, rhinoceroses, bear, lion, mammoth, bison, hyenas, and much else. It’s difficult to imagine that world, with all those animals living alongside humans in France at that time.

Some of the drawings, made with charcoal, are incredibly sophisticated and beautiful by any artistic standard. The 3-D effect gives you a compelling sense of place. In all, the headache is probably worth it, because this film is really about the artists who made the pictures, not the pictures themselves, so you want to have a feeling for the spatial layout of the cave, which the 3D gives.

On the down side, the tone of the documentary is academic but not very scientific, so the information given, mostly in Herzog’s voice-over, is mildly interesting but not too informative. There are interviews with scientists who show what the ancient humans wore, how they hunted, and how they played tunes on a tiny, carved ivory flute that was found in the region. But there is little scientific information about climate, diet, trade, migratory patterns, housing, ecology, and so on. There is not even much technical information about how the pictures were actually made.

Instead, Herzog shows a nearby heated biodome housing albino alligators and suggests that maybe they are not really alligators but ghosts, mere reflections of the real alligators, just as the cave paintings are reflections through time of a way of life we can no longer understand. That’s a stretch, but I indulge it, because he is Herzog. So even though I am grateful to glimpse inside the Chauvet cave (which is sealed up to avoid the kind of damage that occurred at Lascaux), I would have better enjoyed a proper scientific documentary, as opposed to this sentimental approach which tries to convey the eerie mystery of our prehistoric ancestors. Still, there’s no denying that the cave is mysterious, and the drawings are incredibly beautiful.