Slogan (1969)
Directed by Pierre Grimblat

Film Review

One-time publicist and award-winning music producer Pierre Grimblat takes sole credit for instigating one of the most creative artistic partnerships of the 1960s.  It was whist making his film Slogan in the heady summer of 1968 that he brought together the celebrated French musician Serge Gainsbourg and the then comparatively unknown English actress Jane Birkin, a union that would have seismic implications for both of their careers, to say nothing of the popular culture of the late '60s, early '70s.  It was whilst working on this film that Gainsbourg and Birkin became romantically involved; a short while after they recorded the most controversial song of the time, Je t'aime, moi non plus, making Gainsbourg France's biggest cultural icon and Birkin an overnight international sex symbol.

Without the sizzling chemistry between its two extraordinarily charismatic lead actors, Slogan would be a pretty unforgettable film, a sad relic of an era where the boundary between soft core pornography and serious romantic drama was gradually being eroded by auteur filmmakers too eager to capture the spirit of the age.  Grimblat clearly sees himself as a great cineaste (in his youth he had nurtured aspirations of being a major poet), but his overdone artistic pretensions tend to get in the way and prevent Slogan from ever being the groundbreaking art house film it so obviously wants to be.

Resorting too often to the kind of self-indulgent cinematographic excesses that even Claude Lelouch might consider way over-the-top, the film struggles to attain any kind of coherence, and what it says about contemporary male-female relationships now appears like something out of the Stone Age.  Short of putting Gainsbourg and Birkin in caveman outfits, with the former menacing the latter with a phallus-shaped rock, it's hard to see what more Grimblat and his co-screenwriters could have done to totally debase human sexuality.  True feeling, as distinct from a mechanical response to the primal sex drive, is as conspicuous by its absence as any semblance of a plot in this lurid late sixties celebration of free love.  The more serious side of the drama - dealing with the messy consequences of an extra-marital affair - are handled in a slightly more adult way, but here again Grimblat's awkward attempts at playing the grand auteur undermine the conviction of both the writing and performances.

Periodically, Grimblat comes close to redeeming himself by inserting the odd laugh-out-loud gag mocking his former profession in advertising, but overall the film is something of a disappointment, too conscious of its cinematic artistry and too carelessly uneven in the writing department.  However, as a glib nostalgia piece, Slogan does a good job at evoking the carefree ebullience and moral vacuity of the era in which it was made, and whatever faults the film may have it's hard not to derive some pleasure from seeing Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin on screen together, incarnating the spirit of the 1960s for all it is worth.  The couple would recreate the same magic in their later, equally flawed film Je t'aime, moi non plus (1976).

Film Synopsis

Serge Faberger is a forty-something publicity director who does not allow his keen interest in the opposite sex to get in the way of a highly successful career.  During the Venice Film Festival, he makes the acquaintance of a much younger English woman, Evelyne Nicholson, to whom he finds himself strongly attracted.  What then ensues is the perfect romance - a tender and passionate coming together of two human souls, with neither wanting to part from the other.  What Evelyne doesn't yet know is that Serge is already married and that his wife Françoise has just given birth to their child.  As her lover agonises over choosing between the two women in his life, Evelyne begins to go off the rails, becoming increasingly possessive of her new love.  Even in Venice, the most romantic city in the world, it seems that there can be no happy ending to a love story...