HOWZAT

“It’s painful and it’s meant to be painful to watch. It’s the strongest, most horrific gesture you can do, but that’s where she is with her guilt. So yes, of course, I find it very, very hard to watch, but that’s what he wants to say and I respect that.”

Today, Gainsbourg is make-up free and her long, dark hair hangs down around her tiny shoulders. She has the same coltish looks as her mother, but mixed with something darker and moodier. She speaks accent-free English in a gravelly voice, with phrasing that betrays the fact that she mostly communicates in French and lives in Paris with her husband, film director Yvan Attal, and their two children, Ben, 12, and Alice, 6. Like her mother, she has combined film with well-received forays into music, having collaborated with Jarvis Cocker, supercool French band Air, and now Beck.

Jane Birkin first shocked society when she bared all as the Blonde in that left-field paean to Swinging Sixties London, Blowup. She met Serge Gainsbourg, France’s adored enfant terrible, when he acted with her in Slogan three years later, in 1969. Charlotte was born two years after that, and together the couple blazed their way through the Sixties and Seventies as cultural provocateurs.

Charlotte, then, is avant-garde aristocracy and was making headlines herself when still a child. When she was 12, for example, she recorded a duet with her father on his song, Lemon Incest. Several countries banned it. Serge Gainsbourg, who died in 1991, condemned the critics for their dirty minds and said it was “a song to the purity of paternal love”. But as his daughter now points out, he knew exactly what he was doing.

Provocation was what he did best, she says, and indeed the word could even be a family mantra. “It was the way they were, the way my father was, mostly. But even though I was part of that provocation – being on Lemon Incest – I was always protected. I was in boarding school at that precise time, so I didn’t even know that it was scandalous when it came out. I had no idea. I knew what I had done and I knew what I was talking about, but I didn’t have to defend it or talk about it.”

Enfant célèbre

Charlotte Gainsbourg’s childhood was hardly typical. Interspersed with school, there were films. She made her first at 13, and by the age of 15 had two more on her CV and a César, the French equivalent of an Oscar.

“I’ve never thought about it,” she says instantly when I ask if she ever wished her parents were ordinary, and that her life hadn’t been defined by being the daughter of two of the most notorious artists in Europe.

However, she then adds, “I’m very proud of my parents, but the fact is, yes, I was affected [by their notoriety] and sometimes it’s nice to be anonymous and not feel the heaviness that comes with having such parents. It’s difficult because I relate to my father and mother all the time. I’ve put them on a pedestal and it’s really hard to feel that what you are doing is OK. It’s hard not to compare myself.”

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why she took on the considerable challenge of Antichrist, to provoke even more than the parental provocateurs themselves?

“It’s true that for this film I did refer to my mother a lot, in the sense that she had done Je t’aime… moi non plus, and it was very shocking at the time. And she was into a lot of sex scenes and nudity and it was like permission for me to do it myself. It’s like she had been on that journey before me and, really, it gave me the authorisation to do what I was doing and to know that it was OK, even to feel good about it and not to feel ashamed. I was worried about [the reaction of] my own children – not knowing when the film would come out, or if they would hear about it and be affected by it. But I just felt that I had lived through it and I was OK. It didn’t make me insane and I didn’t suffer from it. So I hope my children will be the same.”

On the set of Antichrist, she would text her mother to tell her what her day had been like. “I had a real dialogue with my mother during the shoot,” she smiles. “She was very supportive and funny. And I needed to make jokes about the whole thing. It was so heavy and it was great to be able to describe my day to her and joke with her about what I was doing. It was like, ‘Guess what I’ve been doing today?’ You know, my day would go from crying and howling and screaming into the sex and the blood. It was hysterical and to put it into words in a text message was hilarious.”

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