Gainsbourg
2010
Serge Gainsbourg was one of the most influential singer-songwriters of the
20th century. Just by being an important musical performer, and thus able to
create his own musical score, he's an interesting subject for a biopic, but
Gainsbourg was not just mildly interesting. He's a damned good subject for a
film.
When he was not experimenting with musical forms, he was
bedding beautiful and famous women, or saying preposterous and provocative
things on TV, often in a disheveled state of inebriation. Imagine Tom Waits
speaking French and actually being as big a degenerate as he pretends to be, and
you'll have a good picture of Serge Gainsbourg.
Not only did he turn into an eccentric and talented genius as an adult, but his
childhood was also fascinating. He was Jewish, born Lucien Ginsburg, and grew up
wearing a yellow star in Nazi-occupied Paris. His parents fled from the
Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917, then fled from the Nazis in Paris in 1940. He
lived a life story which was made to be told on film.
I'm not sure why, but the author of this film, who also directed the film and
wrote the graphic novel upon which it was based, decided to present Gainsbourg's
life by splitting him into two people. When the film version of Serge Gainsbourg was
about 12 years old, he saw a gross anti-Semitic poster which the Nazis had
posted in Paris. The rude caricature came off the poster and stayed with him
throughout his life as his doppelganger. This is something Gainsbourg himself
might have approved of, since he created his own mythic doppelganger called "Gainsbarre,"
whom he presented in his art as the Mr. Hyde living within him.
For our purposes, none of that matters. What we want to note is that
Gainsbourg made love to a lot of beautiful and famous women, including Brigitte
Bardot and Jane Birkin. (Actress Charlotte Gainsbourg is the daughter of Serge
Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin.)
Videos from Deep at Sea:
The following others get naked:
Someone's Knocking at the Door
2009
This is a low budget splatter film which attempts to test the outside of the
envelope in some ways. It begins with some sort of druggie answering the door
for a naked woman. She says, "I want to fuck you to death," and begins the
process. About a minute into the process, she turns into an ugly guy with a dick
the size of a tree trunk, and proceeds to keep her/his word, fucking the druggie
to death by perforating and/or destroying his internal organs.
And that was some of the more normal action in this often surreal film which
threads the needle between the horror and psychological thriller genres.
A bunch of jaded med students are getting high on a rare and powerful
experimental drug. It seems that this same drug was used on some psychotic
killers back in the 70s. The killers were a husband and wife team, represented
by the naked he/she of the first scene, and they have somehow combined into one
evil force which is terrorizing the students one by one. Or something. What's
going on here? It's all explained in one of those surprise endings which shows
us that we are actually in the real universe, and theoretically shows us why
everything which had seemed so surreal was simply a matter of perspective.
Spoilers ahead:
You know the ol' "it was just a drug-induced hallucination" twist? You know the
ol' "these were just the last thoughts before he died" ending. You can easily
imagine how an ending could combine both of those. Suppose the dying guy were
expiring from an overdose of a powerful hallucinogenic drug.
At least I think that's probably what was going on. I won't swear to it, though.
Lots of kinky nudity. I did the videos this time:
