Extraordinary Mothers and Daughters by Emily Freidenrich

Author:Emily Freidenrich [Freidenrich, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books

NOTHING NEED BE PERFECT

Jane Birkin & Charlotte Gainsbourg

“I realized recently that I love imperfection,” Charlotte Lucy Gainsbourg told Harper’s Bazaar in 2017. The Paris-born actress, musician, and face of Saint Laurent continued, “We’re in a world that is digitally perfected. You have to look perfect, speak perfectly, be politically correct. Everything is polished.” Charlotte is known to push back on magazines and media outlets retouching her photos to erase wrinkles and imperfections: “That imperfection is what makes me human, and [it’s] what makes people interesting.” In her forties, she sees no reason to pretend she’s twenty.

Charlotte has been subject to public judgment and the pressures of fame from a young age. She’s the daughter of a British-born mother, model-actress Jane Birkin, an icon of effortless Parisian style and beauty, and a French singer father, the provocateur Serge Gainsbourg. Together, they were the ultimate it-couple of 1970s Paris.

Today, Charlotte is a successful actress (considered a muse to director Lars von Trier) and occasional recording artist since the 1980s. She is still seen by Parisians as Serge and Jane’s daughter (the couple split when Charlotte was nine)—which can be paralyzing creatively, she has said. She told Vogue that feeling she had to live up to the expectation her parents set meant that often she “didn’t dare try.”

Charlotte’s first experience with the spotlight came with some controversy. In 1984, Serge released the song “Lemon Incest” (a play on “lemon zest”) featuring his then-thirteen-year-old daughter. Charlotte says she was insulated from much of the backlash at the time, but has always seen the lyrics (about the kind of love they would never share as father and daughter) as “pure” of intention, with Serge’s trademark twist meant to provoke his audience. The song topped French charts for ten weeks. “I was used to his excitement about provocation,” she reflected to the Guardian. “This is what he was good at.”

Paris eventually became stifling and overbearing for Charlotte. Her dad died suddenly there in 1991, when she was only nineteen. When her half-sister, the fashion photographer Kate Barry, tragically died by suicide in 2013, she decided she needed a change. Moving to New York with her longtime partner (Israeli-born actor and director Yvan Attal) and their three children in 2014 gave Charlotte the change she needed—emotionally, for sure, but also as a kind of creative-kickstart afforded by relative anonymity. “I could breathe again. I was liberated here. Not a lot of people recognize me [in New York].… It was a new life.”

She felt freer to explore her interest in photography and drawing and reawakened her music career. “[In New York] I feel I’m being myself with nobody noticing,” she told the Guardian in 2019. “I feel very different, because I’m not looking at myself all the time. I don’t think in France I could have released my album and written the lyrics myself.” Rest, her deeply personal 2017 French and English album, explores motherhood, growing up, love, and grief; in a song titled “Kate,” she sings, “On d’vait vieillir ensemble” (“We should have grown old together”).

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