Charlotte Gainsbourg cherishes the delicacy and nostalgia of The Passengers of the Night
The low-key new film has the French singer-actor-fashion icon thinking a lot about the 1980s, her famous parents, and motherhood
Charlotte Gainsbourg plays a mother who has to find her footing after her husband leaves her.
The Passengers of the Night screens at VIFF Centre from July 1 to 8
ONE OF THE FIRST TIMES we meet Charlotte Gainsbourg in the new film The Passengers of the Night, she is folding socks and towels, lifting them off a collapsible rack in the middle of a dated, orange-and-brown-decorated highrise apartment.
It’s striking: the effortlessly cool daughter of famed singer-actors Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, the chic style icon from the pages of French Vogue, the enigmatic songstress who works with Air and Beck, and the fearless star of some of Lars Von Trier’s most extreme films… Doing laundry.
But it turns out that this role—a sensitive mother of teenage children who’s finding her feet after her husband leaves her—is deeply, affectingly close to Gainsbourg’s heart. It’s not just that she, too, is at the same stage in her life, of watching her children grow up and leave home; The Passengers of the Night is set, atmospherically, in what was an especially poignant decade of change for Gainsbourg as a teen.
In Mikhaël Hers’s quiet, moodily retro-feeling family saga, set in 1980s Paris in the highrise-filled Beaugrenelle neighbourhood, her Elisabeth struggles to support herself, two children who are almost ready to leave home, and a troubled but free-spirited teen who she takes in from the streets. “How are you going to do? You’ve never worked,” her aging father says to her incredulously at the beginning of the film. “Thanks,” Elisabeth says, and bursts into tears.
Speaking to Stir over Zoom with the subtly refined mix of French and British accents she’s inherited from her parents, Gainsbourg connects the 1980s inextricably with spending time with her father, France’s revered singer-songwriter.
“I lost my father when I was 19, and the 1980s in the film are really so close to those years where my parents had split and I was alone with him over the weekend,” she says. “It was such a special time, but then of course he died and I went into another life. I met Yvan [Attal], the man I'm still with today, and had children.”
Gainsbourg confesses to being a painfully nostalgic person. That’s the perfect mindset for a film like The Passengers of the Night, which meditates on the delicate beauty of life’s small moments and fleeting relationships.
“I feel that I cultivated that nostalgia with my father very much, because he was very sentimental about the past,” she reflects. “And then my mother was also very much like that—cherishing her childhood, cherishing that time with my father. So I sort of did the same at a very early age. And so I’m nostalgic about everything, really. You’re nostalgic about your own children when they were babies—I mean it never stops!
“I feel that it is a weakness,” she continues. She then begins to talk about her late sister Kate Barry, the fashion photographer who was Birkin’s daughter with composer John Barry. (Kate Barry died tragically in 2013, falling from a fourth-floor window.) “I remember I used to say to her, ‘Oh, it was so wonderful when we were in Normandy, remember?’ and she used to say, ‘It wasn't great, we were bored all the time.’ She had such a different perspective on her childhood; she was much more in the moment. And Yvan, my partner, also is someone who’s not nostalgic at all. And I can see that it's a great strength: you’re moving along but you're not scared. I'm always scared of losing something, because it was so much better yesterday that it means I can't cherish what's coming up today. Even if I trust the future and I'm not scared, it doesn't make you very brave. I never want things to change.”
French director Hers fills the film with vintage signifiers like newspaper kiosks, classic Renaults, cowl-necked sweaters, and the ever-curlicuing smoke of a thousand unfiltered Gitanes. At one point, Elisabeth scores a job at a switchboard in the kind of old-style late-night-radio studio that hasn’t existed for decades. The director even goes so far to seamlessly insert archival 1980s street scenes of Paris.
Gainsbourg calls the apartment set “magical”. Because The Passengers of the Night was shot during COVID, she and the cast and crew had to isolate and eat separately, even though they were all away from home, housed in Caen, Normandy, for the shoot. On the plus side, she drew a lot of inspiration from the intimate, homey set.
She laughs remembering the reaction of the film’s teen actors—Quito Rayon-Richter, Megan Northam, and Noée Abita, who she refers to as “my kids”—to the objects in the film’s central apartment, which almost becomes a character in itself.
“Those three were looking at the set and looking at the telephone and looking at the TV and the record player, and it was, like, prehistoric-era to them,” she recounts. “They were making fun of it. But for me, everything was moving. A packet of Gitanes for me was just so incredible! Even the newspapers, everything. And for them they couldn't believe how old it all looked.”
What appealed most to Gainsbourg about the part of Elisabeth was that she is a woman we don’t often see portrayed on screen. Gainsbourg has played a mother before, of course—most memorably in Melancholia, as the nerve-rattled matriarch clinging to life and her small son amid impending cataclysmic doom. Here, Elisabeth comes from a different generation than the actor who plays her—one where women were expected to stop their studies and jobs to have children and keep house. But the character’s experience of motherhood at middle age still speaks directly to women facing an “empty nest” and the need to let their children, and themselves, take risks—although it must be noted here that Gainsbourg says she doesn’t think of herself as middle-age, and we can definitely concur.
“For me it was just a woman of my age dealing with the departure of your children—and that’s not something we talk about,” she says. “In real life, we talk about children growing up, getting pregnant, babies, and then adolescence and all those crises, but we don't really talk about the departure—which is so heartbreaking, sometimes, for parents and for mothers. Kate, my older sister, said to me, ‘We’re not prepared for it. Nobody tells us that it's going to be so difficult.’
“The thing is, I wasn't in my life until I had children,” Gainsbourg continues, exuding the honesty and openness that make her acting so raw and affecting. “I was always nostalgic but also very morbid, because I’d lost my father. I was very, very… Down. Then, when I had my children, I was suddenly useful and I knew what to do and I had a purpose. And you still have a purpose when they’re adolescents—I went through the big crises with my children, and sometimes it's really difficult, but you still have a purpose.”
Charlotte Gainsbourg calls the retro apartment set “magical”.
She pauses and notes that she’s found it difficult, as a parent of three, to fill the void when a child departs home. “With my daughter who just left, I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she admits. “Then when the little one will leave… I know what to do when I'm shooting a film, when I have my kids, but I have to have a purpose and if I don't, I don't know how to function.”
Those kinds of nuances of parenthood and family life explored in The Passengers of the Night get very close to the intimate, everyday, optimistic lyricism of another ‘80s-nostalgia-inducing French director, Éric Rohmer. Like Rohmer, Hers avoids big, contrived drama for something more low-key, quiet, and real. You never witness Elisabeth’s rows with her husband, for instance, only the emotional fallout that comes in their wake.
Gainsbourg, who, viewed from the outside, has led a larger-than-life existence, appreciates that smaller, hushed scale of The Passengers of the Night—and the director who created it.
“It’s little successes that Elisabeth has in the film that I find very, very touching, because she never stops being so human and very true to herself,” she says, pointing out the kids in the film often have an easier time facing their trials than she does, as an adult. “She’s shy, but at the same time I think she’s a very emotional but sweet character.
"What I find appealing about the film is it’s so sensitive and fragile," she adds. "And it's very much the way Mikhaël himself is.”
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