It was 15 years ago this month when actor/singer/daughter of rather famous parents, Charlotte Gainsbourg, was between not-inconsiderable jobs. Her film with Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier – the in no way provocatively titled Antichrist – had just come out, and in a few weeks her album with American writer/producer, Beck – the in every way tellingly titled MRI – would soon follow.
While this was happening, she was in Australia to make The Tree, and happy to talk about near-fatal accidents, hostile media and what’s not always said but still understood.
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CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG WASN’T EXPECTING cheers when her film Antichrist screened at Cannes this year. Which is fortunate.
The latest inflammatory missive from the gender wars by the serial provocateur Lars von Trier tracks the devastating and finally brutal collapse of a marriage in the wake of a child's death. Featuring the now obligatory von Trier elements of masturbation, madness and mutilation, the film opened to press jeers and angry accusations of misogyny directed at the Danish filmmaker.
It’s hardly the first time that word has been thrown at von Trier who has made an art of punishing women (and earning the actors playing them critical acclaim), from Emily Watson in Breaking The Waves to Bjork in Dancer In The Dark and Nicole Kidman in Dogville. There were even boos when the director and stars, Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe, faced their first press conference in Cannes.
"With Antichrist I was prepared," says Gainsbourg in a light girlish voice whose accent is much more the refined upper-middle-class of her English mother, the singer/actor Jane Birkin, than the French of her father, the roguish singer, writer and actor Serge Gainsbourg.
"The producers and distributors, once we knew we were going to Cannes, said prepare yourselves for people being really quite hostile. I thought I would get into the theatre and people would throw things at me, so I was really well prepared and had a nice surprise. Although the press conference and press screening didn't go well, the normal audience in the evening went surprisingly well. People really applauded."
More than applause, the 38-year-old Gainsbourg, who has been acting since she was 13, won the best actress prize at Cannes for her unvarnished performance of a woman moving from grief and guilt to an all-consuming hatred. And now, despite the extremes of emotional and physical abuse the character, and she, endures in Antichrist, Gainsbourg, in rural Queensland to film Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, not only defends von Trier but describes the experience of making the film as comforting in its own way.
"I think I do have a masochistic streak, I'm sure about that,” she says. “To go into grief, painful emotions, is something very gratifying because it's very intense but there's something you can get out of it which can be completely exhilarating.”
She says it was “a gift” to be offered a part where she could go to such extremes for two months, an intense but short period she could embrace because of its finite term.
“Being able to be in crisis for two months and be able to be hysterical and go over the top and all of that. I've never been offered a part like that before,” she says. “And I knew it.”
Gainsbourg uses a similar argument to describe the drive behind her third album, due out early next year, called MRI (or IRM as it is in France). Produced and written for her by American folk/electro/hip hop genre bender Beck, the album, and the title track in particular, explore the physical and mental scarring of her recovery from a brain haemorrhage suffered after a waterskiing accident in 2007.
This recovery involved multiple experiences within an MRI machine and the rhythms and sounds of that claustrophobic medical tool infiltrate the song much as they had infiltrated her.
"That experience that I had, having an accident and then going through a loss of MRIs, it felt right [to write about it] because it was the most powerful experience I'd had in the recent past," Gainsbourg says. "I dealt with a lot of things, a lot of fears, with being for a whole year very very fragile. Not only in a physical way, because I was quite all right medically, [but] in my head it was a hard time for me.”
Is there a masochistic element to making music as well? Is there some pain in the process from which she derived pleasure?
"It did happen because that's the way I was. Maybe," she says slowly. "I did go through a period of time in the recording where I felt very vulnerable, not healthy, quite fragile about myself. I was completely isolated in Los Angeles, even though we were working all the time at [Beck’s] house. I often feel a great loneliness that wasn't pleasurable. But it did put me into subjects that I wanted to talk about. It did put me in a place where things did come out."
For Gainsbourg, whose first notoriety was recording the song Lemon Incest with her father in the same year she made her film debut, this album was approached in an unusual way. Beck wrote all the songs, filling the songs with his own cultural references, but drawing from the spoken and unspoken contributions she made.
"Yes, it is the weird thing of, I don't know, strange communication. Of wanting to talk about something and he just puts it into words and then you make the song yours," Gainsbourg describes. "It's a strange thing. I remember the first song he wrote was Master’s Hands and he made me say ‘drill my head all full of holes’ and he didn't know what I had just been through and that I did have a surgery which meant that I have a hole in my head."
That unspoken understanding is a key element in film or music or indeed any collaborative art, even if you can't speak to each other in the same language or with the same cultural references.
"I had really the same thing with Lars. You do understand that in the end it's not words that make you communicate, it goes a bit beyond that."
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