I began with a 33-second-long video of eight-year-old Charlotte practicing the piano. After that, my paper began in earnest. As in this post, I ended with a more contemporary video, but I only had time to play about 30 seconds worth. Due to time constraints, I was unable to include the official and live studio versions of "Lemon Incest." I've embedded them below.
Charlotte Gainsbourg, the daughter of actress Jane Birkin and musician Serge Gainsbourg, was 12 years old in 1984 when she recorded the song "Lemon Incest" with her father. It was part of Serge's multimedia project to bring her to the world's attention by way of a song he wrote, produced, and sang with her. Two years later, he followed it up with an album he wrote and produced for her in conjunction with a film he wrote, directed, produced, and co-starred in with her, both called Charlotte For Ever.
But first came the single. The title was a play on the French words for lemon zest, "un zeste de citron." It doesn't scan in English, but in French, "lemon incest" translates as "inceste de citron." The title was designed to provoke, and it did, although the lyrics, when translated into English, dispute the idea that there was a sexual relationship between father and daughter. That made it no less controversial, because Charlotte, by way of Serge's lyrics, is still describing what that scenario could be like, even if she isn't describing what it was like, painting pictures such as "The love we'll never make together is the most beautiful, the rarest, the most disconcerting, the purest, the headiest."
Fifty-eight years old at the time, Serge mumbles the lyrics over a Chopin-gone-disco beat in a rum and nicotine-saturated rasp. By contrast, Charlotte sounds like the child that she was. Her voice is tentative, unsteady, and pitched uncomfortably high. Her father sounds relaxed, possibly even a little bored, whereas she gives the distinct impression that she'd like to be anywhere else doing anything else.
Despite the bad press the single generated, and possibly even because of it, it was a top 10 hit in France where it spent four weeks at #2 on the singles chart. When asked about it in 2010 by Sean O'Hagan of The Observer, Charlotte said, "Fortunately, I had just gone to boarding school when the song came out. I was totally unaware of this big scandal. I was protected from it." As for the lyrics, she said, "I knew what I was talking about. But for me, it wasn't a problem. I had fun with it. Plus, there was pureness behind it. It's really the love of a father and daughter." And that’s been her line on the song for 26 years now.
But the video tells a different story. If "Lemon Incest," title aside, describes the love of a father and daughter, the Serge-directed video warps that idea beyond recognition. It isn't selling love or affection, but rather sex. That's exactly what many videos were selling in the 1980s, but few of them featured a semi-nude father and preteen daughter miming their song in a sexually suggestive manner atop an unmade bed. Instead of bedroom furnishings, the dry ice-shrouded duo cavorts amidst marbled floors and mirrored walls as if they were the display in a museum to illicit sex. There are no cutaways to other locations or times in their lives. It's about the moment, and nothing else. At 5:08 minutes, it feels like an eternity.
For sheer cringe-worthiness, the title track of the 1986 film, Charlotte For Ever, gives "Lemon Incest" a run for the money. It plays over the opening credits in which Serge is billed simply as Gainsbourg, while Charlotte is billed by her full name. In the song, Serge and the male backing vocalists sing the chorus, which plays more like a paeon to a dead girl than a live one, while Charlotte whispers in a wavery voice that plays like a less seductive version of the orgasmic sighing Jane Birkin contributed to her infamous 1969 duet with Serge, "Je T'aime … Moi Non Plus," which translates as "I Love You … Me Neither."
In the film, Serge plays Stan, a screenwriter, and she plays Charlotte, his estranged daughter. Charlotte believes Stan killed her mother, who died in a car accident. At this point, I should note that Serge and Jane Birkin had split up in 1980, so this is six years later. The film has no interest in his guilt or innocence--he insists it was an accident and we're meant to believe him--but the absence of a mother figure allows him to double down on themes he first established in "Lemon Incest." It's a long list: he focuses on Charlotte's derriere while she's pouring a bath, films her taking off her top while she dances in front of a mirror, has her bathe him as if he was a child, and establishes that she sleeps in the nude. His character also undresses one of her school friends, and suggests that the girl is okay with it. "You're like a creamy toffee," he tells Charlotte at one point, "Still fresh." The implication is that adult women are not.
Throughout, Serge objectifies all of the women in the film and converses with his daughter primarily about sex. Sometimes, Charlotte protests; sometimes she doesn't. Once she decides she's had enough, she insults his latest conquest before yelling, "He's mine!," kicking the woman out of their flat, and enjoying a slow dance with dad. The film ends with the two on an unmade bed, much as in the video for "Lemon Incest," as they writhe to the sax-saturated electropop. The point is that Stan has finally convinced Charlotte he didn't kill her mother, but more importantly, that they're meant to be together--forever.
Even if they weren't related, Charlotte was only 15 at the time. By building a film around his daughter, he had the opportunity to counter "Lemon Incest" in some way, but instead, he reinforces the idea that the song wasn't merely a fluke or a provocation, but that he really wanted people to think he was sexually attracted to her, not least because he doesn't even bother to give her character a different name.
Fortunately, the album he produced for her isn't quite as creepy, though the tinkly synths, rubbery bass, and hair-metal guitar solos haven't aged well and Charlotte sounds no more mature than she did on the single. Nonetheless, the solo numbers work better than the ones in which her father barges in to duet with her.
Between the song and the film, Charlotte played another motherless character named Charlotte in Claude Miller's L'Effronte, aka The Impudent Girl. Thirteen-year-old Charlotte, who describes herself as homely, becomes entranced with a pretty blonde piano prodigy and ends up having a fling with a welder who is working on a project for the girl's manager in an attempt to get close to her. It sets the tone for the career to come as she'll often play women who aren't as pretty as they or other people would like them to be.
Jane Birkin, who has described "Lemon Incest" as "perfectly beautiful," would go on to star in a 1988 film with Charlotte, Agnès Varda's Le Petit Amour, aka Kung-Fu Master!, in which she plays a 40-year-old single mother who falls in love with a 15-year-old boy. Varda's script sprung from an idea that Birkin brought to her. Charlotte and Lou Doillon, Jane's daughter with director Jacques Doillon, play her kids.
Like Jonathan Glazer's Birth, it isn't a film about sex so much as the romantic feelings two age-inappropriate people can have for each other. Varda's approach is sympathetic and non-judgmental, but it's also deeply sad. It may be coincidental that Birkin would star in such a film, but the Birkin-Gainsbourg clan shared similar interests, and it's worth noting that Mathieu Demy, Varda's son with director Jacques Demy, plays the boy. As Birkin's Mary Jane tells Charlotte's Lucy, "Feelings are so important when you're 14, 15, 16." The implication is that the feelings of adult women aren't quite as important.
Eighteen years later, Charlotte re-launched her music career with the album 5:55. As a singer, she hadn't changed much since 1984. Her vocals, much like her speaking voice, are so effervescent they practically melt into the instrumentation. She sings in English, although you can hardly tell. The lyrics, written by Pulp's Jarvis Cocker and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon, are hard to discern. Nigel Godrich, best known for his work with Radiohead, produced the album and Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of Air served as composers.
To her credit, Charlotte reintroduced herself as a musician with a charming, baroque-pop sound, though it comes across more as a collection of tasteful influences than a personal aesthetic. One of those influences, of course, was Serge Gainsbourg, maybe not lyrically or vocally, but certainly musically. "The Songs That We Sing" for instance, makes use of the same swirling melody as "Bonnie and Clyde," her father's famed duet with actress and one-time lover Brigitte Bardot.
The next year, in 2007, Charlotte suffered a brain injury as the result of a waterskiing accident. Two years later, she issued IRM, a collaboration with Beck, who had sampled her father's "Melody Nelson" for the song "Paper Tiger" off his 2002 album Sea Change. On it, she emerges as a more confident musician who has learned to speak up in all senses of the term. Instead of whispering, she's developed a Marc Bolan-like croon that suits Beck's glam-rock backing.
Though she recovered from her near-fatal injury, the precarious feeling of suspension between life and death stayed with her. The title is the French initialism for MRI, the scanning device with which she became obsessed. On the title track, she circles Matmos territory as she integrates its beeps into the rhythm track. It's still a collaborative effort more than a true solo work, since she only co-wrote one song, but more of her unique personality comes through.
Charlotte's acting career, meanwhile, would continue to encompass a wide variety of films, many non-confrontational in nature, but she would court controversy again with roles in Danish director Lars von Trier's Antichrist in 2009 and the two-part Nymphomaniac in 2013 (between the two, she also appeared in von Trier's less sexually-explicit Melancholia). Not counting her uncle Andrew Birkin's male-gazey 1993 adaptation of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden, in which she plays one half of an incestuous brother-sister duo, these films would come closest to inspiring the kind of uproar that "Lemon Incest" once did.
In Nymphomaniac, for instance, she plays a woman who claims to have become addicted to sex at the age of two, although she doesn't lose her virginity until years later. For all of the gynecological nudity, the film isn't explicitly judgmental. If anything, von Trier feels for Joe who is consumed by guilt for the harm her single-minded focus has caused. It's to an older man, Stellan Skarsgård’s professorial Seligman, that she tells her story. He believes she's too hard on herself, and since he claims to be asexual, the director eliminates the possibility of sexual tension. In true von Trier fashion, however, he takes all of the good will generated by that dynamic and throws it away in the film's final moments. Once again, a good man reveals himself as bad, although in this case, the woman emerges triumphant in best Freudian fashion.
Off screen, Charlotte suffered the most crushing loss since the death of her father in 1991 when her half-sister, 46-year-old photographer Kate Barry, the daughter of Jane Birkin and composer John Barry, died as the result of a fall from her fourth-floor window that same year. Barry had struggled with drug and alcohol addiction since she was a teenager, and the fall was believed to be intentional, though Charlotte has expressed her doubts about those claims. The loss spurred a move from her native Paris to New York City with her partner, writer-director Yvan Attal, and their three children the following year. In the aftermath, she would begin work on the album Rest, which includes songs about both Serge and Kate.
Although it isn't surprising that the daughter of a male musician would work with so many men, the lack of women in her discography is disappointing. Instead of working with women, however, she did something even more significant: Charlotte wrote every song on Rest, her first to include French lyrics, something she had previously avoided specifically to distinguish her work from her father's. In French, the word reste with an "e" means "stay," lending the title a double meaning.
And this is the point, at the age of 46, that she truly becomes the author of her own narrative, though the album still features notable male guest stars, including Paul McCartney and Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. She also directed the striking, B&W video for "Deadly Valentine," which features Dev Hynes of Blood Orange.
But there's more to it than that. Just as her father introduced her to the world through a duet, she would introduce her youngest daughter to the world in a similar way. You'd think she'd have learned her lesson, but the context is entirely different as Jo, now eight years old, simply sings her ABC's over the hidden track at the end of Rest. And that's the extent of it: a kid being a kid. Something Charlotte never really got the chance to do, at least not in any kind of conventional sense.
If she's never disavowed "Lemon Incest," to the extent that she still performs it in concert, she appears to have done everything within her power since the recording of the song to make sure that it won't be the thing for which she's best remembered.
I'd like to end with Charlotte performing "Lemon Incest" in Arles, France in 2018. She turned 47 that year; she turned 49 this year. She appears relaxed, confident, and in control. In this case, she sings her father's part while synth player Paul Prier sings the part she sang as a child. It’s her song now.
Images from Wikipedia (2009's IRM and 2017's Rest, both Because Music), Amazon (1988's Le Petite Amour, Prism Entertainment home video), and Discogs (1985's "Lemon Incest" 7-inch and CD single, 1986's Charlotte For Ever full-length album, and 1986's "Charlotte Forever" 7-inch, all Philips).
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