Slogan (1969) - film review

At forty, Serge Faberger is a successful, award-winning publicist, and a man with a very active interest in the opposite sex.  When he meets twenty-something Evelyne Nicholson, he wastes no time making her his mistress.  It is the perfect romance – tender, passionate, and neither wants to be parted from the other.  But Serge is married and his wife Françoise has just given birth.  When he hesitates over choosing between the two women, Evelyne starts to become neurotically possessive.  Is there such a thing as a love story with a happy ending...?

Although it’s unlikely ever to win any awards as a serious piece of cinema, this curious piece of late 1960s kitsch certainly manages to evoke the era from which it came.  Watching it is a very strange experience, a bit like stepping back in time to that all-too brief halcyon age of optimism, psychedelia and free love, when women had no hang-ups about being sex objects and men weren’t expected to be anything other than chauvinistic Neanderthals with only one thing on their mind. 

Admittedly, Slogan looks like something that Claude Lelouch may have made on a bad day, after having imbibed one glass of Sauvignon Blanc too many.  The plot, what there is of it, is a predictable mess but the jokes (particularly the O.T.T. ads) make up for this, in part.  There is one very good reason for watching this film – it features Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin at the very beginning of their legendary romance.  Not long after this torrid rencontre, Gainsbourg and Birkin recorded the most controversial song of the time, Je t’aime, moi non plus, making Gainsbourg a cultural icon in France and Birkin an international sex symbol.

© James Travers 2008

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