Bea’s Reviews > It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin > Status Update

1/ “Birkin’s career does not neatly fit into one clearly defined box. She was more than the sum of all those parts. Seeing her simply as an inspirational figure flattens her. By the end of her life, she’d moved on from her role as a muse. She was a tastemaker who changed the world around her, altered the cultural fabric of the times with her artistry and individuality. The nature of her fame can only really…

2/2 “…there to comfort you, that I’ll be gone. I put you in orbit only to abandon you,’ she says, and then adds almost offhandedly that she needs to put everything in the girls’ names for the purposes of taxes and duties.”

1/ “Birkin worried that, in the years following Kate’s death, she had been so wrapped up in her own distress that she didn’t think of her children who were alive; that she glorified Kate. She admits she spent sleepless nights wondering what it meant to have put three beings into the world: Who would die, and when, and how? Her own mortality was clearly at the top of her mind. ‘And the fact that I won’t be..

2/ “…has been left untouched.

‘It smells the same,’ she says on-camera. ‘It’s almost like being in a dream.’ She remarked that the rue des Saints-Pères, a street perpendicular to rue de Verneuil, is like the mythological river Styx. ‘I don’t cross it. Everything that happened there seems to be from another time. As if this life belonged to another person. It’s strange.’”

1/ “The title of [Jane by Charlotte] is a conscious echo of the Agnès Varda documentary, positioning itself as a sort of sequel. But unlike the genre-bending creativity of Jane B. par Agnès V., the dialogue between the filmmaker and subject feels strained, even if the settings are familial: Birkin’s home, a visit to a bulldog breeder, Birkin’s first trip back to Serge Gainsbourg’s home, which

“[Gainsbourg] wanted to isolate her; privately she found his antics exhausting enough that she second-guessed her choice to be with him. After filming La piscine, back in Paris in the fall of 1968, she admits in her diary that she became involved in this relationship too quickly: ‘Now he loves me and in a way I want that and I love him, and I also want the world because, through him, I began again.’”

easier for me to read nonfiction in print than as an audiobook (unless it’s sthn simple like a celebrity memoir)