Serge Gainsbourg is held up, by me, as the undisputed master of Parisian perversity, audibly in his music and visually in his films. With titles like the exhibitionist Stan the Flasher or the incestuous Charlotte for Ever, he’s one of the few directors who continually lived up to the devious promises of his first flick, Je T’aime Moi Non Plus.
Warhol himbo Joe Dallesandro is the über-trashy Krassky, a homosexual garbage man who dumps refuse with his clingy boyfriend, the homicidally jealous Padovan. When they stop for lunch at a run-down diner, he meets Johnny (Gainsbourg’s then-wife, Jane Birkin), a noticeably androgynous waitress desperate for some sort of human connection.
In many beautifully filmed scenes of raw attraction put to a gorgeously lush soundtrack, the two fall in inseparable love, but when it comes time for hetero-intercourse, Krassky can only perform one way, and I’m sure you know what that is: wholly stereotyped searing anal, of course, causing absolute pain for Johnny, whose dry screaming gets them thrown out of every motel in town.
They eventually find sexual solace in the back of his garbage truck.
While some have called Je T’aime misogynistic — the brutal finale makes it an absolutely hard accusation to fight — this un-love story shared its title with the notorious Gainsbourg/Birkin tune of the same name, a lust-filled romp that, though not as sweet, is a cynical view of diseased love like many of his songs. With a pedigree like that, it’s strange his films aren’t held up as the sleaze-filled treasures they should be. —Louis Fowler