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It’s in this decade, she cemented her fashion legacy when Jean-Louis Dumas, chief executive of Hermès, created the now much sought-after Hermès Birkin bag as a replacement for the signature straw basket she’d carried since the 1960s, after it was destroyed when Doillon reversed his car over it.
It’s also when she began working with directors like Varda, James Ivory, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard, while pushing her own artistic boundaries.
Inspired by the deaths of both Gainsbourg and her own father in the early 1990s, Birkin wrote a script, detailing her complicated life as a parent to three daughters with three different men, and the lingering connection she has with her own father. A decade later, it became her 2007 directorial debut “Les Boites,” or “Boxes,” starring Natacha Régnier, her daughter Lou Doillon, and Adèle Exarchopoulos.
Birkin’s semi-autobiographical film has the same loose, airy style as Varda’s provocative 1987 film “Kung-Fu Master!” in which Birkin plays a divorced woman who finds herself drawn to a 14-year-old boy, played by Varda’s son Mathieu Demy, disrupting the lives of her daughters, played by Birkin’s actual daughters Charlotte and Lou.
“Boxes,” explores similarly thorny territory. Told through the lens of grief, regret, and reflection, living characters interact with the dead; Birkin’s Anna has a jovial relationship with the ghost of her father (Michel Piccoli), while her middle daughter Camille (in some meta-casting played by her youngest daughter) has an uncomfortably close relationship with the ghost of her father (Maurice Bénichou). The film is sometimes a little too ponderous, but it’s also a deeply personal, brave, and raw exorcism of Birkin’s personal demons.
Towards the end of “Jane par Charlotte,” Gainsbourg’s voice narrates as she and Birkin share an embrace by a roaring sea, saying, “I wish I were like you, for having faith in life seems to be your philosophy. To live without mistrust. To believe in humanity, in people. To be curious about everything, close to everything, to everyone without filters.”
While Birkin the icon is a projection, a phantom that belongs to the public, Birkin the woman, Birkin the artist belonged only to herself, and her daughters. The legacy she has in them, and the body of work she left behind is as unique, contradictory, and incomparable as she was.
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