Review: ‘Jane by Charlotte’ is a daughter’s intimate profile of her famous mother

Fearlessly potent actress Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Melancholia,” “Antichrist”) steps into her first directorial foray for a portrait of her mother, English French singer Jane Birkin, in the hyper-intimate documentary “Jane by Charlotte.”

Rather than chronicling Birkin’s biography, Gainsbourg takes a decidedly personal, slice-of-life approach with interviews conducted in the privacy of Birkin’s countryside home or during a photo session. Discussing the perils of aging, the joys of being a middle child, or shared parenting fears, their exchanges on camera reach fascinating corners of their relationship. Gainsbourg in turn extrapolates these discoveries to her own daughter.

Partly responsible for how authentic and unabashed the conversations come across is that they are at times shot by Gainsbourg on either a digital or film camera. This immediate quality contrasts slightly with the still handheld, but more traditionally executed frames of cinematographer Adrien Bertolle elsewhere. However, it’s in several jarring musical transitions where Gainsbourg commits her biggest aesthetic misfire.

Other than a couple early sequences of Birkin on stage in Japan and New York, there’s barely any mention of her storied professional career. Likewise, Gainsbourg’s film work is only mentioned in passing once. In fact, anyone watching without any previous knowledge of who these women are outside this framework would gain zero essential context from the film itself. To feature their opinions on each other’s artistry would have made sense.

In its effort to procure tender moments of truth that nurture the two of them, Gainsbourg’s portrayal of Birkin turns too insular, almost like finding a treasure chest full of someone’s home movies and being unaware of the past events that the people in those videos reference, as in the case of the death of Birkin’s eldest daughter.

By the time Gainsbourg and Birkin visit their old home, now a museum housing the relics of Charlotte’s father, French singer Serge Gainsbourg, one’s expected to be aware of his prominence, because no dialogue or text will prime us. Presumably, this lack of background information is less of an issue in France, where the family is more of a household name.

Undeniably, what distinguishes “Jane by Charlotte” from any number of filmic or literary excavations that exist on Birkin hinges on the unbreakable union between its subject and its storyteller. No one else could have elicited these responses from the songstress other than her own daughter, and for that this is a worthy, if historically vague, effort.