Like that other French national institution Edith Piaf, Serge Gainsbourg is known as little more than a one-hit wonder in Britain. Although recent re-issues have gone some way to boosting his reputation here, he still seems to be rated only by serious music fans and Jarvis Cocker. I wonder whether Joann Sfar’s biopic Gainsbourg, packed with so many incredible songs, will find new fans for the singer-songwriter who died in 1991, or (as is more likely) appeal solely to those already in the know. It has to be said that such films seem to be made by fans for fans - surely a David Hasselhoff biopic would only have a market in Germany. This, of course, can lead to a somewhat uncritical approach to the subject matter, and Sfar certainly seems guilty of this.

The musical biopic is perhaps the most rigid of genres, complete with its own strange, idiosyncratic rules. Perhaps this is because until recently it included mostly made-for-TV movies, such as Summer Dreams - The Story of the Beach Boys (1990) or The Karen Carpenter Story (1989). With the exception of Todd Haynes’s Dylan and Bowie innovations (which divided audiences), the rules of the biopic seem unbreakable and Gainsbourg does not challenge them.

A musical biopic is not about what is going to happen (we usually know that), it’s about how it will happen or how it is going to be portrayed. So we sit through The Doors thinking, when is he going to flash his penis? In the Joe Meek film Telstar, we wonder, when is he going to kill his landlady? It is a genre that singularly lacks suspense. In the case of Gainsbourg - as 62 years are condensed into just over two hours - we might also wonder what is going to be left out. Will we see him sleep with Bardot? (yes) Will we see him win Eurovision (no) or make lewd propositions to Whitney Houston? (sadly, no). It’s just a waiting game.

A successful biopic depends first and foremost on the performances. These films rarely (never?) win awards for direction or writing but almost always win for acting. Recent acting Oscars have gone to Ray and La Vie en Rose while Walk the Line got a win and a nomination (losing the best male lead award to its near-cousin, the literary biopic Capote). The key is the central performance, and Gainsbourg scores full marks here. Eric Elmosnino is not only an uncanny lookalike (although I suspect prosthetic ears), but has perfected Serge’s mannerisms and movement - that perpetual slightly drunk swagger. He walks the line between charming and lewd with great skill. As with Ray and La Vie en Rose, the film itself may be average, but the central performance is outstanding.

All good biopics also need a strangely accurate performance from a talented child-actor - a portrait of the artist as a young man. Kacey Mottet Klein’s young Gainsbourg (or Lucien Ginsburg as he was known then) is a revelation. The charming little Jewish boy surviving in wartime France seems worthy of his own film. In addition, we also need a cast of instantly recognisable lookalikes in the supporting roles. Laetitia Casta’s Bardot is pretty impressive; Lucy Gordon’s Jane Birkin has straight hair and a mini-dress but doesn’t really look like her. It might seem superficial, but in this genre this is important. Many a John Lennon film has been marred by low-quality Beatles - a real distraction.

One of the strangest quirks of the genre is the soundtrack: the cast must also sing. It would be somehow inauthentic to mime to original recordings. Elmosnino’s Gainsbourg impersonation is again of the highest standard but it was Lucy Gordon’s perfectly breathy Jane Birkin that had me checking the credits at the end (yes, the songs were actually performed by the actress, who committed suicide shortly after the film was finished). Of course, it helps that the songs are great, and I enjoyed seeing the lyrics translated in the subtitles (so it’s not about lollipops!!!) and realising what a good lyricist he was.

And finally we need a convincing ‘rosebud’ - the key to understanding who he/she is. Here the key seems to be Gainsbourg’s insecurity about his strong Semitic features. Although he seems quintessentially French to the English, he was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. This anxiety manifests itself as a Nazi propaganda poster chasing him down the street and an enormous caricature puppet (all nose and ears) that appears at all the wrong times.

Gainsbourg ticks all the boxes, and despite a few innovations it is a pretty traditional biopic. The pleasures of watching a musical biopic are equivalent to watching Stars in their Eyes. But if that TV show were to have a Gainsbourg special with Serge, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, France Gall and Juliette Greco impersonators (and no Matthew Kelly) I’d definitely watch it, and I’d phone in a vote for Lucy Gordon’s version of ‘Le canari est sur le balcon’.

Paul Huckerby

Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s first original screenplay in 30 years, has been hailed by some as a return to form. Although it is not in the same class as the four films he made in the 1970s (The Conversation [1970], The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 [1972-1974] and Apocalypse Now [1979] all regularly feature in all-time greatest film lists), it is reminiscent of some of his more interesting work from the following decade, particularly Rumble Fish, The Outsiders (both 1983) and One from the Heart (1982). Like the former, it is beautifully shot in high-contrast black and white.

Although Coppola’s writing credits are impressive - deservedly winning an Oscar for the brilliant Patton (Franklin J Schaffner, 1970) and co-writing The Godfather - it is the script that proves to be Tetro‘s flaw. It is an over-egged Freudian/Oedipal melodrama about an artistic Italian-American family, the Tetrocinis, and the effects of its dominating patriarch (Klaus Maria Brandauer grandly stating, ‘There’s only room for one genius in this family’), which has had everyone drawing comparisons with the Coppola clan (although who is supposed to represent Carmine, Francis, Sophia or Nic Cage is not exactly clear).

Set in Buenos Aires, the film centres on two brothers: a world-weary, beaten beatnik writer (Vincent Gallo in the title role) and his innocent younger brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich symbolically dressed in a pure white seaman’s uniform at the outset), who tries to discover why the talented brother he had grown up idolising is hiding from his family in Argentina and seems to have given up on his dream of becoming a writer.

As we meet Tetro’s quirky group of friends, a scene of an angry girlfriend cutting up Armani suits and smashing guitars sent worrying messages that we might be entering that same cliché-ridden ‘life among those passionate Latins and artists’ world presented to us by that other fading star of the 1970s, Woody Allen, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Luckily, such scenes do not dominate Tetro. What we have instead is an old-fashioned soapy plot that is somehow just too melodramatic to be engaging. And although Pedro Almodí³var has proved time and again that such a mix of stylish filmmaking and melodrama can work in the 21st century, Coppola is less successful with the blend here. Mostly because the film demands that we take the overblown drama seriously.

However, in most other aspects the film proves its worth. The performances are strong throughout. Vincent Gallo rises to operatic intensity to deliver a perfect hammy Dean/Brando impression that outshines both Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke in Coppola’s SE Hinton adaptations. Maribel Verdíº somehow holds the film together despite being a modern woman stuck in a 50s melodrama, and Alden Ehrenreich is a revelation - a C Thomas Howell for the 2010s (if one is needed).

As the drama moves from the mildly preposterous - Bennie discovering his brother’s magnum opus in a suitcase and finding that it was written in a secret code that can be read using a mirror - to full-blown ballet sequences, Coppola, who has never been known for subtlety, piles on the heavy metaphors. He might not be using the entire Vietnam War to show the corruption of the human soul here but costumes (dark glasses, leather jackets, plaster casts) and scenery (towering glaciers, glaring headlights) are all used ‘poetically’ to show the emotional and psychological depth of the characters.

Although the times when a film being ‘personal’ was seen as a sign of quality and of a ‘true artist at work’ are long gone, Coppola’s authorship here transcends the obvious autobiographical aspects. Visually, so much is borrowed that it could be argued that Coppola is more ‘pasticheur’ than ‘auteur’ but what shines through as personal is the director’s deep love of cinema. It is a film that seems more cinematic than his other works (if that is possible). Coppola himself credits the influence of Elia Kazan, whose blend of stylish location-based realism with the theatrical (as in Baby Doll [1956] and On the Waterfront [1954]) is certainly apparent in Tetro. This belief in the power of filmmaking and love of cinema (an excerpt of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman [1954] is even included in the film) stands to remind us of why Coppola, along with Spielberg, Bogdanovic and Scorsese, earned the collective moniker ‘the movie-brat generation’.

Tetro may be pretentious and bombastic but there is also much to enjoy. It is a beautiful film - the contribution of cinematographer Mihai Malamaire is every bit as vital as Vittore Storare’s work on One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now. And Tetro stands as proof that Coppola, with an almost stationary camera and nothing more technical than light on film, can still achieve a more stunning visual experience than the 3D CGI of Avatar.

Paul Huckerby

We are pleased to announce that the winner of our May film writing competition, run in connection with the Electric Sheep monthly film club at the Prince Charles Cinema is Simon Johnson. Our judge was Time Out film critic Tom Huddleston, who said: ‘Simon Johnson’s review of Midnight Cowboy may read more like a diary entry than a film review - gleefully breaking that cardinal critics’ rule of keeping yourself out of it - but its a heartfelt, lovingly written and rather touching celebration of a classic film.’

Here’s Simon Johnson’s review:

It was just as the Greyhound left the Port Authority bus station bound for Florida that it occurred to me. I turned to my friend Shane, a fellow cineaste, and asked him if he remembered the scene near the end of Midnight Cowboy when Joe Buck and Ritso Rizzo, aka Ratso, left the very same bus station, also on a Greyhound and also bound for Florida. ‘Of course,’ he replied, ‘and that means you’re Ratso and I’m Joe Buck!’

This was in 1989 and in the intervening years many times have letters, postcards and emails been exchanged between us always arguing who is indeed Joe Buck as neither of us wants to be Ratso. On that Greyhound all the way to Miami, we came to realise how much the film meant to both of us. It was often shown late at night on the BBC in the 1970s and 80s and I always made a point of seeing it. For a teenage boy the film was impossibly sophisticated, exciting and even a little bit dangerous. The heady mixture of illicit sex, religion, counter-culture and New York was intoxicating. This was the New York I was looking for on my first visit in that summer of 1989, even more so than the city of Taxi Driver or Mean Streets. Being fairly broke meant that we did see the seedy side depicted in the film.

I still watch the film every year and even though some argue that it is dated it always seems fresh and dynamic to me. Oh, and Shane, I’m Joe Buck!

It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than 15 years since comedian and satirist Bill Hicks died of pancreatic cancer. An icon of the stand-up circuit and a favourite of students, left-wing politicos and, well, anyone with a healthy interest in life and a good sense of humour, Hicks has left an enduring legacy and is regarded as one of the very best, despite never really being recognised in the US during his lifetime. He was certainly held in higher regard here than in his native America - a recent Channel 4 poll (April 2010) of the top 100 comedians of all time placed him fourth, two places higher than the last time the broadcaster ran this poll in 2007.

Perhaps that’s why the best and most comprehensive documentary film about Hicks’s life and works had to be made by a couple of Brits, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas, both BBC factual programming alumni. Unlike many other biographical docs, their documentary, American: The Bill Hicks Story, eschews the standard approach of interviewing all and sundry, instead focusing on the thoughts and memories of those who knew him best, his family and closest friends. Such talking heads as his mother, brother and childhood best friend offer an illuminating snapshot of what Hicks was like off stage and how his comedy developed, often sharing intimate memories of what it meant to really know this ‘outlaw comic’.

Unsurprisingly, the clips of Hicks doing what he did best, performing in front of an audience, raising hell about the likes of the hypocrisies of mannered societies and the corruption of the human condition, particularly in the US, are the most engrossing, and gut-bustingly funny too. Even the most dedicated fan will not have seen all of these clips (some video, some audio), but all of them will, hopefully, bring the requisite smile to their face. Clearly, Hicks fans will garner the most from the rarer clips, but even the most jaded comedy fan should find at least a few classic anecdotes to tickle their funny bone.

Harlock and Thomas have certainly put a lot of thought into the film and it works on almost all levels. However, while the interviews with his family and friends and the unique stand-up footage engage throughout, the documentary’s presentation does not quite nail the punch line. By manipulating thousands of private photographs, including those taken by Hicks himself, the directors have created animated links that, while initially stimulating, ultimately become wearing. Some will revel in this innovative approach, but others may start to wish for a little more variety. Equally, while there’s plenty of footage of Hicks performing, there’s always the frustrating feeling that they could have shown a little more, or perhaps slightly longer clips, such is Hicks’s ability to elicit laughs.

It’s a sad fact that, at the age of 32, Bill Hicks went before his time, thus denying us his distinctive insight (or perhaps that should be incite) into such topics as the election of George W Bush, Guantanamo Bay, the war on terror and the economic collapse. However, at least with films such as American: The Bill Hicks Story, his spirit can be kept alive and perhaps even inspire the next generation to challenge authority, speak their mind and tell a few damn good jokes.

And by the way, if anyone reading this is in advertising or marketing - kill yourself!

Toby Weidmann