Charlotte for Ever

To his credit, Viennese Jewish actor and director Fritz Kortner was so angered by Uncle Adolf and his gang making him flee Germany that when he returned to the Fatherland in 1949, he exploited his glaring Jewishness on stage, intentionally acting as an obscenely sinister Shylock in a 1960s production of The Merchant of Venice, even stating of his respect for the fictional anti-Semite-inciting Hebraic Venetian moneylender, “he stands up and he is a terrifying Jew, and that’s why I play him. He does not whine for mercy…I am an unintimidated Jew… I have found out that you succeed with this perspective rather than trying to sneak in.” While Kortner’s antics were surely subversive in terms of overtly agitating the very same people that considered him a member of a hostile enemy group only a couple decades before, they pale in comparison to the way degenerate French Judaic singer and songwriter Serge Gainsbourg routinely exploited the more unsavory stereotypes of his seemingly forsaken tribe throughout his entire highly obnoxious and proudly obscene career. Apparently, Gainsbourg was deeply affected as a child by having to see his fellow Jews wear yellow stars as a result of the German occupation of France during the Second World War and his work certainly reflected this as especially demonstrated by his 1975 album Rock Around the Bunker, which is completely dedicated to National Socialist themes and features song titles like “Nazi Rock,” “Yellow Star,” and “S.S. in Uruguay,” yet the singer more oftentimes used more ‘cryptic’ approaches to attacking and morally degrading the ostensibly antisemitic goyim. Certainly, both in physical appearance and behavior, Gainsbourg put the Jewish caricatures featured in Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher’s tabloid newspaper Der Stürmer to abject shame and it is certainly no small coincidence of history that he produced a bastard brood with the grandniece of German Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus of the Battle of Stalingrad, which is oftentimes considered the event that sealed the tragic fate of the Occident. 

 Indeed, from turning innocent blonde beauty Francis Gall into a sucker by getting her to record the song “Les Lucettes” aka “Lollipops”, which the yé-yé singer thought was about suckers but was really about sucking cock, to recording the French national anthem “La Marseillaise” in a reggae style to infuriate right-wingers and nationalist veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, Gainsbourg thrived on being a culture-distorting kosher creep who deracinated French kultur by Americanizing music and giving it a perversely pornographic tone, but arguably his most radically repugnant publicity stunt was recording an incestuous duet with his then-12-year-old daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg entitled “Lemon Incest” in 1984. Aside from the song evolving into an equally degenerate music video featuring the father and daughter in bed together in their underwear, Gainsbourg also directed a largely forgotten film entitled Charlotte for Ever (1986), which features, among other things, his then underage teenage daughter Charlotte topless, as well as engaged in would-be-lurid lesbo love, which her unhinged incestuous father watches up close in complete amazement. Charlotte for Ever is more or less a pathetically preposterous artsy fartsy chamber piece featuring Hebraic homeboy Gainsbourg as a widowed weirdo writer of the desperate dipsomaniac sort that lurks around his home with a Michael Jackson-esque leather glove and lusts over his daughter and her schoolgirl pals when he is not begging for money and berating his long suffering buddies. Surely seeming like a cheap and tasteless gimmick compared to the singer turned filmmaker’s surprisingly decent directorial debut Je t'aime moi non plus (1976) aka I Love You, I Don’t starring Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro as a ‘bisexual’ Polack garbage truck driver and Jane Birkin as a tomboyish waitress with a dyke cut, Charlotte for Ever is ultimately a reminder that the only reason Charlotte Gainsbourg is a screen sex icon is because she is the progeny of a world famous pernicious pervert who taught her at an early age to sexually degrade herself on film and not because she is even remotely attractive, not even as a little Lolita (of course, Gainsbourg makes the carelessly cliched mistake of namedropping Nabokov’s obscenely overrated novel). 

 Stan (Serge Gainsbourg) the swarthy little man is a washed up screenwriter who apparently paid his dues in Hollywood and now spends most of his time getting drunk, lusting over and denigrating his daughter Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and feeling up her middle school comrades, talking trash to and scamming money out of his friends, and having sex with morbidly obese prostitutes that would probably suffocate him if they sat on his rather repulsive rat-like face. Ever since he killed his wife in a car wreck where he collided with a large truck, Stan has been immersed in a personal hell that neither whisky nor his daughter’s itty bitty preteen titties can save him from, or so it seems. At the beginning of the film, Stan begs his bud Herman (Roland Dubillard) for a $10,000 advance because he is broke even though the screenwriter has already been given an advance and instead of producing a script, he was only able to finish “three lousy pages.” When Charlotte gets home from middle school, literally and figuratively dirty old men Stan and Herman take turns hitting on her and she eventually flips out and cries, “I want my mom. I want to see my mom.” Naturally, poor Charlotte blames her incestuous pedophile father for her belated mommy’s tragic death. 

 As one can expect from a pretentious screenwriter of the daughter-lusting sort, Stan likes quoting Nabokov’s Lolita, which Charlotte has read because she proudly stole a copy of the book from her school library. After Charlotte blames her father for her mother’s death, Stan slaps her in the face and then reveals in a melodramatic fashion that he wears a leather glove because, as he states, “I tried to drag mom out of a pile of metal and burned my hand.” Of course, the viewer suspects he wears the glove because he is a pretentious prick who wants to give off the image that he is a perverted sadist of the ultra chichi sort. When Charlotte and her nerdy school friend Therese (Sabeline Campo) decide to play bowling in the house by using wine bottles as pins in a game where the loser must show the winner her pussy, Stan gets mad after finding broken glass on the floor and punishes his daughter’s friend by making her cleanup and subsequently opening up her shirt and feeling her small breasts. When his daughter’s friends are not around to manhandle, Stan has a morbidly obese prostitute who is so fat that she waddles come over so that he can revel in the malodorous pheromones of her smelly rotten lard cunt. Although a predatory heterosexual, Stan is friends with a fat old queen named Leon (Roland Bertin) who is suicidal because his hustler boy toy has broken up with him. Needless to say, when Stan remarks to Leon regarding his boyfriend, “Your Stephen is an asshole…And he doesn’t like guys, it’s obvious” and “He used his ass to pay the dealer,” he has a little queer bitch fit and asks his friend if he has any humanity. After crying about his parents, wife, and dog being dead, Stan the untermensch then cries, “And any day now Charlotte will have a kid or bring a guy home…some worker, black or Asian, it’ll be just great,” thus revealing that he is against miscegenation, even though his progeny is the product of such an unnatural union. Meanwhile, Charlotte physically assaults and rips off the bra of her friend Adelaide (Anne Le Guernec) because she is jealous her pal has been getting banged by her father. Needless to say, Stan gets a kick out of seeing his daughter on top of a topless young girl that he has been banging and gets closer to the young ladies to get a better look. 

 Near the end of Charlotte for Ever, Gainsbourg allows his daughter to put a handgun to his head, but unfortunately she does not pull the trigger. Notably, the very end of the film features father and daughter lying in bed together, with the former stating to the latter, “You’re a little shit” in a scene that seems to express Gainsbourg’s frustration with wanting to defile his daughter but not being able to bring himself to go all the way (although he confesses to groping her breasts while drunk). Indeed, in terms up delighting in defiling innocent little dames of the underage sort, Gainsbourg only transcends fellow Hebraic holocaust survivor Roman Polanski, but unlike the Rosemary’s Baby director, the Judaic frog songwriter seems to take great pride in his pathological perversion. Not surprisingly, Charlotte Gainsbourg continued playing in relative-directed incest-themed films as she later starred in her British uncle Andrew Birkin’s Ian McEwan adaptation The Cement Garden (1993). Of course, Lars von Trier would later provide Charlotte with the cinematic surrogate father she needed after cinematically exploiting her in works like Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac (2013).  Of course, only someone as uniquely unsavory as Serge Gainsbourg could ever think a swarthy sub-homely horse-faced lady like Charlotte would ever make for a stunning sex symbol of the silver screen. Undoubtedly, what makes Charlotte for Ever interesting is that the film demonstrates that the eponymous pseudo-diva has always seemed like a dark, damaged, and depraved gawky gal who probably has the talent to turn rampant heterosexuals into gynophobic queens, but I guess one should not expect anything less from the mongrel progeny of a monster like Monsieur Gainsbourg.  Of course, directed by Gainsbourg or not, Charlotte for Ever is unequivocally the sort of preposterously pretentious and pathologically plodding film that gives arthouse films, especially of the French persuasion, a bad name.

-Ty E