Picture of the movie Jane par Charlotte (Jane by Charlotte) © Nolita Cinema / Deadly Valentine
Jane by Charlotte, intimate conversations
For her first experience behind the camera, Charlotte Gainsbourg chose to highlight her relationship with her mother, the legendary Jane Birkin. From a concert in Tokyo in 2018 to October 2020, she follows her for almost three years, creating an intimate work that aspires to help the two women bond. A women's film anchored in the present, screened at Cannes Première.
It’s the present-day Birkin, aged 74, with all her joys and sorrows, that Charlotte sets out to show by following her in her daily life between her Parisian flat and the family home in Brittany. With the help of a cinematographer, and sometimes on her own with a small camera, Charlotte engages in intimate conversation with Jane and tests her ability to renew the dialogue with a mother from whom she has become somewhat estranged following her American exile.
After a first series of interviews that were not well received by the singer in the wake of her Tokyo concert, she had wanted to stop the project, but then reversed her decision with brio. Edited by the two women in a linear fashion, shot in Tokyo, France and New York, the film ends in October 2020, a date pregnant with meaning, which corresponds to Charlotte's definitive return to Paris. An unprecedented exchange beyond the modesty of this legendary and much publicised duo, and a universal conversation between a daughter and her mother.
