Je t'aime moi non plus [I Love You, I Don't]

Serge Gainsbourg (director, screenwriter, composer)
Jane Birkin, Joe Dallesandro, Huges Quester (starring)

Paris: President Films, Circa 1976. Vintage borderless reference photograph of Jane Birkin from the 1976 film. "Societe Nationale" stamp on verso.

Waitress Johnny works and lives in a truck stop, lonely and longing for love. She develops a crush on the garbage truck driver Krassky, although her sleazy boss Boris warns her that Krassky is gay. Krassky likes Johnny too, perhaps because of her boyish physique. But both of them fail to notice the growing jealousy of Krassky's boyfriend Padovan, and trouble sets in.

Billy Stevenson of notes in the "A Film Canon" blog: "Serge Gainsbourg directed this film based on his iconic song, and it plays as an extended gloss on that song, an attempt to visualize what was happening during those infamous sighs and pants ... It is 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 30 years later.

"[Set] 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...with an audioverite that makes you wonder whether these scenes [might actually] involve real sex. 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—[the film] ends up virtualizing it, or at least generalizing it into an undifferentiated sexual access that feels quite incorporeal, a clear forerunner to both the Cinema du Look and art porn movements."

6.5 x 9 inches. Near Fine.


[Book #151965]