Actor · 1971

Charlotte Gainsbourg

5: briefs
13:00: average
65 min: in total

On film.briefs5

Jane B. par Agnès V.

Agnès Varda · 1988

Agnès Varda’s 1988 essay-film Jane B. par Agnès V. is a collaborative, self-reflexive portrait of actress and singer Jane Birkin, conceived around her apprehension at turning forty. Blending real interviews with scripted vignettes in which Birkin plays invented roles, the film rejects linear biography in favour of variation, ambiguity, and playful artifice. Shot in English with a modest crew and naturalistic craft, it foregrounds Birkin’s presence — humorous, vulnerable, restless — over exposition or resolution. Though occasionally uneven in execution, its intelligence, warmth, and formal daring make it a singular work in Varda’s filmography and in the history of cinematic portraiture.

13:00

Kung Fu Master

Agnès Varda, Gordon Chan · 1988

Kung Fu Master (1988), co-directed by Agnès Varda and Gordon Chan and written by Jane Birkin, follows Mary-Jane, a woman in her forties, as she becomes emotionally entangled with Julien, a fourteen-year-old boy. Built around real-life family members and shot with observational restraint, the film avoids moral framing in favour of precise, unhurried attention to gesture, silence, and domestic space. Its power lies in what it refuses: explanation, escalation, catharsis. The narrative culminates not in confrontation but in divergence — memory, consequence, and time operating on irreconcilable terms.

13:00

Antichrist

Lars von Trier · 2009

Lars von Trier’s 2009 film Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a grieving couple who retreat to a forest cabin, only to confront psychological disintegration, theological dread, and nature’s indifference. Shot digitally in Germany with precise, unrelenting craft, it divides itself into symbolic chapters and refuses narrative or emotional release. Though polarising and widely debated for its imagery and themes, it remains a benchmark of arthouse extremity — technically controlled, thematically uncompromising, and ethically demanding.

13:00

Nymphomaniac

Lars von Trier · 2013

Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is a two-part, four-hour English-language drama in which a woman recounts her sexual history to a celibate man who interprets it through analogies drawn from mathematics, music, and natural history. Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stacy Martin as different ages of the same woman, it is structured as a series of titled chapters, filmed by Manuel Alberto Claro and edited by Molly Malene Stensgaard. Produced by Zentropa in France, it asks not whether desire can be understood, but how interpretation inevitably distorts it.

13:00

Melancholia

Lars von Trier · 2011

Lars von Trier’s 2011 science fiction drama Melancholia uses an inevitable planetary collision to examine how two sisters—one depressive, one anxious—respond when all future is cancelled. Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg anchor its two-part structure, supported by Manuel Alberto Claro’s restrained cinematography and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde prelude, which dictates the film’s rhythm. Made by Zentropa with co-producers across Europe, it premiered at Cannes, where Dunst won Best Actress. Its power lies in tonal certainty, not plot mechanics: it asks how consciousness persists when meaning has no horizon.