PARIS – Filming of A Woman Like Me, an Italian-French co-production directed by Roger Vadim, first husband of Brigitte Bardot and her director in And God Created Woman (1956). On the bed, under the covers, naked, we find the two protagonists Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin. Moment of embarrassment, also because Brigitte loved Serge Gainsbourg before Jane. To break the ice, BB suggests that Jane sing one more time, this time together and laughing: Je t’aime… Moi non plus, the song that brought the Serge-Jane couple to the world, the Serge, however, two years earlier had It Was Written for Her, Brigitte Bardot, on a night when BB had asked him to compose “the most beautiful love song ever”.
BB had sung it but then changed his mind and, fearing the reaction of her husband Gunter Sachs, had asked Gainsbourg not to release the song full of sighs. Serge kept the song in the drawer, but he knew he had a masterpiece at his disposal. When he fell in love with Jane, he asked her to cover the same song. As Jane Birkin herself put it in an interview with Corrieredi a few years ago: “We were at the Fontana recording studio in London, in Marble Arch. I particularly remember wanting to please Serge and sing high notes, like he did it.” he asked me. We were far away, Serge directed me but kept his distance with his gestures. By the second take, Je t’aime… Moi non plus was done. Back in Paris, we placed it in the restaurant of our hotel, the Hôtel, on rue des Beaux Arts: people stopped eating and were amazed. Serge said to me: “Well, we’ve hit the bull’s eye!”, we couldn’t stop laughing.” The title means “I love you…me neither” and takes up Salvador Dalì’s pun: “Picasso is Spanish, me too.” Picasso is a genius, so am I. Picasso is a communist, and neither am I.”
Yesterday, Brigitte Bardot published a letter commemorating her friend and the complicity that bound them. “A truly sad Sunday, July 16th! I’m very sorry, Jane is gone. If you’re so beautiful, so fresh, so spontaneous and have a child’s voice, you have no right to die. Jane will always be in our hearts. She has escaped the mud that is devastating her second home (quote from the song La gadou composed by Gainsbourg) and whispers to us Je t’aime. Nous non plus, what remains of France will answer you.”