Backstage clip - Confession d’un enfant du siècle (2012)
About that English rocker, French girl thing.
Beside promotional activities for Melancholia, her third baby, her fourth album, and its attendant live tour, Charlotte’s other project in 2011 was up-and-coming director Sylvie Verheyde’s Confession of a Child of the Century, an adaptation of Alfred de Musset’s thinly-novelized account of his love affair with the much-older George Sand. (Whatever else Charlotte Gainsbourg may be, she is a busy woman.) Charlotte was cast as not-George - remember that Yves Saint Laurent smoking jacket? - and, of all people, sempiternal Libertine (small l and large) Peter Doherty as not-Alfred. For the record, Doherty was supposedly a dove on set, his behaviour and inexperience less problematic than his lack of French, which meant the production couldn’t apply for the usual culture grants and had to resort to the Kickstarter-like Touscoprod to cover a 25,000-euro budget shortfall. (Don’t panic: as I write, they’re at 118% with 138 days to go.)
Several UK media outlets reported on this piece of epic stunt-casting hilarity with the angle that the benighted French take Doherty to be another Serge Gainsbourg. This is patent nonsense; clearly they take him to be another Oscar Wilde. Wilde never wrote a word after he repaired, broken and syphilitic, to Paris, but that’s of little import. In the accepted history of Western civilization, it falls to France to accommodate the British Isles’ cultural producers when they make the British Isles too hot to hold them – or even if, like Jarvis Cocker, they merely married a Frenchwoman and had a hankering to get out of town. Meanwhile, when Charlemagne’s scions get into trouble, they go to Africa like Rimbaud. #factseveryoneknows
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So: One Week One Band stint is done!
I enjoyed it - I can’t actually tell if stuff like the above ridiculous post is any good or not, but it felt “like me,” whereas my occasional efforts at the gig/release review, numbered-list, hype-cycle type of writing have always felt forced. Though really all I wanted was to get through a bunch of ideas without descending into complete incoherence or embarrassingly myself unduly, and I think I just about managed that, so, uh. Thanks to everyone who read and responded, you are too good. ♥
