grantss Mildly interesting biopic on a French singer-songwriter who was apparently famous (probably only in France). More energetic and original than most biopics, it overdoes the imagery. The monster that flits in and out of scenes, representing Gainsbourg's dark side, I guess, is irritating from its first appearance and gets more irritating the more it appears.Cutting out the imagery and some of the more unnecessary scenes would have created a tight, fast-paced, and much more interesting movie. The ending was rather abrupt and unsatisfying too.Great performance by Eric Elmosnino in the lead role. Like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, I think he modeled his performance on Keith Richards' mannerisms. Good support from a cast which includes Laetitia Casta (as Brigette Bardot) and Lucy Gordon.

Victoria Weisfeld This 2010 biopic—directed by comic book artist Joann Sfar, who wrote the script with Isabel Ribis based on Sfar's graphic novel—came across every bit as messy and undisciplined as its subject's life. Serge Gainsbourg (played beautifully by Eric Elmosnino) was a French painter and highly successful musician and songwriter of the 1960s and 1970s, who is considered a leading, if occasionally scandalizing, figure in French pop music. Sfar gives Gainsbourg an imaginary alter-ego (La Gueule, played in a cartoonish mask by Doug Jones) who at first is his cheerleader, encouraging him to create and perform, but who comes to be a darker force, egging on his bad behavior. (It's somewhat reminiscent of how Michael Keaton was dogged by his former self in Birdman.) Meanwhile, Gainsbourg bounces from one love affair to another and in and out of marriage, having notable liaisons with Brigitte Bardot, Juliette Gréco, and a ten-year relationship with British actress Jane Birkin. His time is spent at the piano writing songs for his lovers and smoking thousands of cigarettes. The movie credits are charming and undoubtedly reflected the talents and eye of Sfar, and the early scenes of the movie about Gainsbourg when he was a precocious young boy (before he changed his name from Lucien Ginsburg), defiantly wearing his yellow star, are charming. But, in a rare concession to boredom, I abandoned the movie after an hour and a half, missing the artist's final downward spiral and his popular reggae period, too. Not to mention the heroic of the film's title.

Starfield Indie This is an outstandingly original film.The performances across the board are superb, the story, for all it's wildly tangential aesthetics engages and often grips.But most of all, its dark exuberance makes it oddly joyful driving the viewer open to it into Gainsbourgs' frame of mind. Imaginative use (SPOILER ALERT) of his haunting if surreal alter ego. In fact this overtly comic-like and "unreal" wilful cipher for Gainsbourg trumps the great risk of turning the picture into farce, and instead brings us closer to the humanity, inner conflict and creative insights of the artist in evolution.I strongly recommend it.

GD Cugham 'Gainsbourg' is both a natural history of the man portrayed and the idea of the man. The brilliant use of creature effects in the make-up of Doug Jones - 'Pan' from 'Pan's Labyrinth' is a multi-layered touch, not enforcing an opinion of Serge upon the audience as such a trick might, but illustrating several things Gainsbourg triumphed over. All of these were his "self". He embraced and made his own the negative and positive appraisals people made of him, could deflect his enemies as well as magnetise friends and lovers. There were many lovers.Bardot is present and accounted for and her portrayal here does little to shift the notion that she was a muse for artists who lusted after her rather than be a truly great artist herself. A panoply of women passed through Gainsbourg's bed linen, but it is his soul mate, Jane Birkin, who provides the beating heart of the film.Portrayed almost chillingly by the late British actress Lucy Gordon, Birkin is first portrayed as the eternal little girl found and nurtured into womanhood by Gainsbourg - with all the ponderous ambiguity that entails - only to become the "adult" in the relationship, she realizing that Gainsbourg's talent, gift and curse was that he was an eternal little boy. His years basking in his legendary status in the 1980s, for which he was repudiated and gained another reputation outside France as a "dirty old man" (ask Whitney Houston... no, he apologised for that on the same chat show though that apology is rarely seen) retain the wistful whimsy of the former half of the film, but do seem a touch like an afterthought. Overall you are left with the sense that this was a man who lived, who was a misogynist who prized women, an artist whose upbringing was comfortable yet whose spirit could play the scale of emotions on heart strings; whose very charisma could melt his enemies' ire.If 'Initial BB' doesn't become the new French national anthem by the end of the year I will be disappointed.