Serge Gainsbourg | Je t’aime moi no plus (I Love You, I Don’t) / 1976

where women are not welcome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Serge Gainsbourg (screenwriter and director) Je t’aime moi no plus (I Love You, I Don’t) / 1976

 

The landscape of French composer, singer, actor, and filmmaker Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 picture Je t'aime moi non plus (I Love You, I Don't) is filmed in a countryside landscape so desolate and isolate and filled with bumpkins that one might be naturally assume the garbage dumps, gas station, and hamburger joint central to this movie were in some rural midwestern or a western locale in the US, or even the industrial wilds of New Jersey—particularly given the fact that the two actors central to this work, Joe Dallesandro and Jane Birkin, are English-speaking.

      But it doesn’t matter since it is clearly meant to be a kind of symbolic space, far enough from true civilization that its characters are forced to live demeaning and meaningless lives endlessly longing for love—a story told worldwide whether it comes from the pen and camera of Gus Van Sant, Derek Jarman, Werner Rainer Fassbinder, or Gainsbourg. These figures’ words are all dubbed into French so it must be an isolate Gallic landscape where they’ve forgotten the arts of fine cooking, architecture, and romantic sex.

       Into this forgotten landscape drive Krassky (Dallesandro, who describes himself as an American Pollack) and his male lover Padovan (Hugues Quester) who evidently is originally from Italy where he’s recently served time in prison. The neighborhood is also seemingly related to a world imagined by Jean Genet since on the way from the dump in which Krassky and Padovan have just emptied their truck, they encounter four other gay boys whose car has broken down and offer them a ride in their empty dumpster while a peasant (Gérard Depardieu) on horse passes, who these boys declare is gay as well. We can only wonder on just what planet we’re landed.

      Inexplicably, the moment they announce that fact Krassky stops the truck and pulls the lever to lift the backload to rid him of the apparently unwanted hitchhikers. In this film, we quickly realize, the unexpected is all that you can expect, and explanations are neither Krassky’s nor Padovan’s forte.

       The duo arrives at a drive-in, order up a couple of cokes and burgers (horsemeat we later discover), and before Padovan can even finish his slot-machine game, the garbage collector Krassky as fallen in love with the boy named Johnny behind the counter, who it turns out is really a girl who with her short-cropped hair, her androgynous face, flattened bust, and small boyish bottom has been waiting for any man good looking enough to come along to take into his bed. Dallesandro, accordingly, is a feast for her eyes. In fact, Johnny’s really Jane Birkin, the girl who tumbled with another of her sex around David Hemming’s feet on purple paper in Blowup (1966) and who, by this time Gainsbourg had made famous all over world for singing with him the song with the same name of this film which he had originally written for Brigitte Bardot, whose husband got jealous when she and Gainsbourg tried to record it. So this film already had a kind of history before they even turned on the projector.

     For most of the rest of the film, the bubble-butted, muscular porn-star Dallesandro tries to find a way to get an erection long enough to fuck this new-found boy-like beauty over, understandably, his handsome and hairy bottom Pandovan’s protests.

     Reviewers have all described the “love affair” between the two, Johnny and Krassky, as representing a groundbreaking examination of gender fluidity, with many declaring that the two are truly in love, even if their love is doomed. Budd Wilkins (writing in Slant) goes further to argue that Gainbourg “chooses here the almost taboo topic of heterosexual anal sex.” “In Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus, it’s a gesture of physical connection and mutual gratification that flagrantly defies what’s considered natural and civilized.” He goes on to argue that “his instantaneous attraction to her remains undiminished even when she turns around.” The writers for Criterion describe the duo’s connection as “a carnal attraction, even when it runs up against the practical physical barriers of genitalia.”  Sounds nice to me.

      But  I’m sorry, I think either these folks missed something or I saw a different movie. In fact, despite the wonderfully framed scenes of these two beauties throughout by cinematographer Willy Kurant, and the brilliant gamin-like expressions of vulnerability and fragility that Birkin displays whenever the camera lets loose of Dallesandro’s butt, the game of “He loves me, he loves me not,” which she willingly plays—hoping that he might even break through to provide her with something that might feel like love—resolves itself in only the second part of this anaphoric paradox.

        Surely Krassky comes to recognize in her willingness to give herself over as a kind of slave, something to which he’s attracted. After all, this is a homosexual who cannot tolerate the idea of being called a “poof.” And in his macho sensibility he realizes in her gender difference a kind of challenge. If there were any female with whom he might ever prove himself a real man, it is with Johnny.

      

    But love, as Tina Turner has made clear, has nothing to do with it. He already has a lover in Padovan, despite his frustration with what might almost be described as the boy’s male hysteria. Looking at her face, even her chest, if Krassky blurs his eyes just a little, he can imagine a boy, but when he looks lower he loses his erection.        

     He can only attempt to fuck her anally, and she is a small-boned woman who suffers significant pain with each thrust of his penis.

     In fact, there is a great deal of humor in this film as he attempts to transform her, somewhat as in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, into the boy he first glimpsed. They try it out in several hotel rooms to be kicked out each time on account of her horrific screams; and they end up trying it even in the back of his garbage truck. But even there, when she tells him that despite the pain, she loves him, his answer is that true love is simply  a matter of coming simultaneously, as if a mutual climax was the goal of any relationship. This a world in which guys take their dates to a violent all-girl roller skating derby, where a barn dance generally includes a competition among the local heterosexual hags for full-monty stripping.  Krassky cannot even bear seeing Johnny in a dress. Johnny is purposely deluding herself since the world in which she exists offers no other alternatives. Women are not welcome here. Sadomasochism is better than no sex at all.

      This is not a film about heterosexual anal sex, in other words, but about a gay man engaging in anal sex with a woman whom he attempts to imagine, unsuccessfully, is a virginal boy. You might as well describe Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus as being a study in pedophilic desire. 

     Almost all the critics see poor Padovan, moreover, as the crazed, uncontrollable villain, but after all this fool has nothing else but his relationship with Krassky to define his existence. He’s beaten up by the hitchhiking gay gang he mocked; and even the pretty peasant he seeks out denies him the pleasure of his cock evidently because of its immense size which has so punished other willing boy butts that he’s been locked up by the cops. Padovan is understandably jealous, and I might argue that that fact encourages Krassky in his endeavors to prove himself “flexible” as well. But Padovan knows that a relationship with Krassky and Johnny, even if it developed to that extent, must come to an end.

       A bit like a Hitchcockian psychopath, he simply wants to hurry it along, not in the shower but in the bathtub, not with a knife but the plastic bag he carries with him as if it were some kind of special charm, a bit like Johnny’s dog or the stuffed doll Krassky has given her. Again something totally inexplicable, the bag at least we observe offers him a warning sign of his arrival, a hat to wear in the rain, and, just to scare off his rival, something to wrap around her face to strangle her to death.

       Krassky appears on the horizon to save the day, tossing away the eatery’s tables and chairs as if he were entering a bar to disperse all the other gunslingers on his way to his final destination in a Sergio Leone movie. Only this time, when he reaches the endangered girl, he merely bends down to make sure she’s still breathing. He does not even move in the direction of her molester. In fact, he takes Padovan’s hand and leads him away, the girl shocked by the absolute turn of cinematically “normalized” events.

     The boys go off into the sunset together as the girl, still naked, falls to the concrete like an urbanized version of Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, having lost her way from what she once knew as her homestead. He’s finally broken her.

      Enough of experimenting with all this gender fluidity, Krassky seems to say, as he crawls back into the cab of his truck with Padovan, happy to have someone into whom he can comfortably fit his cock when they find their way home at night.

      Gainsbourg’s work is perhaps one of the most beautifully filmed comedies ever made.

 

Los Angeles, December 15, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).