Gainsbourg: Je T'aime Moi Non Plus (I Love You, I Don't) (1976)

Serge Gainsbourg directed this film based on his iconic song – and it plays as an extended gloss on that song, an attempt to visualise what was happening during those infamous sighs and pants. At one level, that might seem to diminish the song – surely, what made it powerful was the way it suggested some act that was too perverse to be visualised or articulated – so it’s a testament to Gainsbourg’s commitment to the song, and his own status as sexual outlaw, that he presents us with a film that’s just as confronting and titillating some thirty years later. In essence, it’s about a lavender marriage coming to terms with a sexually liberated mileu: Jane Birkin plays Johnny, a tomboy who finds herself drawn to an itinerant gay truck driver, Krassky, played by Joe Dallesandro, against a drifting, rambling desert backdrop, part New Wave, part New Hollywood. Johnny and Krassky’s attraction is sexually charged, and yet it doesn’t seem to conform to their sexual proclivities: in particular, Krassky can’t achieve orgasm unless he penetrates Johnny anally. For the most part, then, their relationship charts Johnny’s loss of anal virginity – a process that never seems to get any easier, as her screams of anguish and pain attest, with an audioverite that makes you wonder whether these scenes involve real sex. Although Gainsbourg’s song tends to recur at these moments, what’s striking is that it never loses its lush romanticism: in fact, the romanticism only seems to be heightened by contrast, lending the sex scenes a quite tender and ravishing quality, even as their discomfiture seems to climax, for Krassky as much as Johnny. And Gainsbourg shoots the whole film like an extended sex scene – his sensibility is inextricably pornographic, if picaresquely pornographic – that beautifully charts out the complex relationship between pleasure and pain, not just in anal sex, but all sexual experience. And, in its yearning to experience sex in every conceivable way - as a gay man, as a lesbian, as a man, as a woman, as pleasure, as pain - it ends up virtualising it, or at least generalising it into an undifferentiated sexual access that feels quite incorporeal, a clear forerunner to both the Cinema du Look and art porn movements.