Film Review
One-time publicist and award-winning music producer Pierre Grimblat takes
sole credit for instigating one of the most creative artistic partnerships
of the 1960s. It was whist making his film
Slogan in the heady
summer of 1968 that he brought together the celebrated French musician Serge
Gainsbourg and the then comparatively unknown English actress Jane Birkin,
a union that would have seismic implications for both of their careers, to
say nothing of the popular culture of the late '60s, early '70s. It
was whilst working on this film that Gainsbourg and Birkin became romantically
involved; a short while after they recorded the most controversial song of
the time,
Je t'aime, moi non plus, making Gainsbourg France's biggest
cultural icon and Birkin an overnight international sex symbol.
Without the sizzling chemistry between its two extraordinarily charismatic
lead actors,
Slogan would be a pretty unforgettable film, a sad relic
of an era where the boundary between soft core pornography and serious romantic
drama was gradually being eroded by auteur filmmakers too eager to capture
the spirit of the age. Grimblat clearly sees himself as a great cineaste
(in his youth he had nurtured aspirations of being a major poet), but his
overdone artistic pretensions tend to get in the way and prevent
Slogan
from ever being the groundbreaking art house film it so obviously wants to
be.
Resorting too often to the kind of self-indulgent cinematographic excesses
that even Claude Lelouch might consider way over-the-top, the film struggles
to attain any kind of coherence, and what it says about contemporary male-female
relationships now appears like something out of the Stone Age. Short
of putting Gainsbourg and Birkin in caveman outfits, with the former menacing
the latter with a phallus-shaped rock, it's hard to see what more Grimblat
and his co-screenwriters could have done to totally debase human sexuality.
True feeling, as distinct from a mechanical response to the primal sex drive,
is as conspicuous by its absence as any semblance of a plot in this lurid
late sixties celebration of free love. The more serious side of the
drama - dealing with the messy consequences of an extra-marital affair -
are handled in a slightly more adult way, but here again Grimblat's awkward
attempts at playing the
grand auteur undermine the conviction of both
the writing and performances.
Periodically, Grimblat comes close to redeeming himself by inserting the
odd laugh-out-loud gag mocking his former profession in advertising, but
overall the film is something of a disappointment, too conscious of its cinematic
artistry and too carelessly uneven in the writing department. However,
as a glib nostalgia piece,
Slogan does a good job at evoking the carefree
ebullience and moral vacuity of the era in which it was made, and whatever
faults the film may have it's hard not to derive some pleasure from seeing
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin on screen together, incarnating the spirit
of the 1960s for all it is worth. The couple would recreate the same
magic in their later, equally flawed film
Je
t'aime, moi non plus (1976).
© James Travers 2022
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Serge Faberger is a forty-something publicity director who does not allow
his keen interest in the opposite sex to get in the way of a highly successful
career. During the Venice Film Festival, he makes the acquaintance
of a much younger English woman, Evelyne Nicholson, to whom he finds himself
strongly attracted. What then ensues is the perfect romance - a tender
and passionate coming together of two human souls, with neither wanting to
part from the other. What Evelyne doesn't yet know is that Serge is
already married and that his wife Françoise has just given birth to
their child. As her lover agonises over choosing between the two women
in his life, Evelyne begins to go off the rails, becoming increasingly possessive
of her new love. Even in Venice, the most romantic city in the world,
it seems that there can be no happy ending to a love story...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.