Perhaps cultural scholars will eventually figure out what Richard Lester’s 1965 film The Knack .. And How To Get It means. Until then we must decide: it is arguably the most impactful British film of all time, made a year after the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night.
He documented “Swinging London” when it started.
And he discovered Charlotte Rampling.
And Jane Birkin.
Anyone who has ever seen “Blow Up” by Michelangelo Antonioni – shot in London a year after “The Knack” – will never forget Jane Birkin anyway.
But most people remember “Je T’aime… Moin Non Plus,” their duet with Serge Gainsbourg, which they recorded while they were married in 1976. Since then, Jane Birkin’s name has mostly been mispronounced in French. In any case, she almost only got acting roles in France, Michael Deville’s “The Wild Sheep” (1973), later Jacques Rivette’s “The Beautiful Querulantin” (1991) and “Life is a Chanson” (1997) by Alain Resnais. Curiously, she starred in two British Hercule Poirot hams with Peter Ustinov, Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1981). She is the best in these movies. And the prettiest anyway.
Jane Birkin came from London-Marylebone, where she was born in 1946. The father was a naval officer, the mother was an actress. So it wasn’t surprising that she was cast in The Knack, a film that couldn’t be made today (nor could Blow Up). In 1968 Birkin married John Barry, the highly acclaimed composer of the James Bond scores, and later Serge Gainsbourg, the greatest provocateur in popular music, if not the world. She worked on Gainsbourg’s masterpiece L’Histoire de Nelson (1971), as well as on the accompanying film. After separating from Gainsbourg, she married film director Jacques Doillon.
Jane Birkin’s published diaries (in the German version of 2019) have remained as fragmentary as her film career and recordings.
And just as fascinating.
Jane Birkin died yesterday in Paris at the age of 76.