SAVING FACE

How Jane Birkin handled the problem of beauty.

- ANAHID NERSESSIAN

Birkin's mysterious charisma and effortless. sense of style could obscure her relentless, often painful search for meaning.

In Agnès Varda's film “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” from 1988, a nearly forty-year-old Jane Birkin, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a tweed blazer, her messy brown hair pinned back, sits in front of the Eiffel Tower and dumps out the contents of her purse. The purse, which she helped design, is named for her: it’s the Birkin bag, by Hermès, one of the most famous accessories in the world. Inside are loose papers, notebooks, a tube of Maybelline’s Great Lash mascara, a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” a Swiss Army knife, pens and markers, a roll of tape. “Well,” Birkin says, in heavily accented French, “did you learn anything about me from seeing my bag?” Then a grin: “Even if we reveal everything, we don’t show much.”

Throughout “Jane B.,” Varda draws attention to the elusiveness of her subject.

Birkin, a British-born actress and singer best known, then as now, for the raunchy pop songs she recorded with her lover Serge Gainsbourg, comes across as both open and enigmatic, singular in a way that is hard to parse. Her beauty is undeniable, but its borders are vague. Proud of her own eccentricity, she is also shy and awkward, with the voice of a little girl—hushed, rushed, and airy. Varda dresses her up as Joan of Arc, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, the Virgin Mary, a cowboy, and a flamenco dancer, as if to suggest that Birkin’s mystery is itself a symbol, one as important to modern culture as Renaissance painting and the mother of Christ.