My allotted 15 minutes is almost up, so I decided to make my last question to Charlotte Gainsbourg purely cinematic: about Lars von Trier. Among her 40 or so film roles, from her collaborations with the provocative Danish director (considered his muse), films such as Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac remain highlights of her career. What does he think makes Trier so special? “His opinion. He is an extremely complex person, and I cannot say that I know him deeply. I believe that what makes him a brilliant creator is that he puts his whole being into everything he takes on. Nothing in his work has remained unscathed “.

When the time allotted to you for an interview is so limited that you never lose sight of your interlocutor for a moment. In the case of Charlotte Gainsbourg, this happens without any effort. She is unpretentious and relaxed, very polite, but not aloof, her image does not correspond to her real age. She is 50 years old and is the mother of three children with French actor and director Ivan Atala. Very thin, she has the body and appearance of a teenager, a mixture of fragility and strength. This famous daughter of famous parents, the legendary French songwriter, singer Serge Gainsbourg (died in 1991) and the English actress and singer Jane Birkin, came to Thessaloniki in November, for 24 hours, as a guest of the International Film Festival, to attend the premiere of Mikael’s film Ersa’s “Night Guests”, in which he plays the title role (the screening will take place next Thursday in Greece).

“The story takes place in the 1980s, during the election of François Mitterrand. The heroine is a mother who has to work to feed her family. Her husband left her, so she starts her own path in life,” he explains.

– Although I was still a teenager then, I have a feeling that the conditions for a parent were completely different. Today’s times are not easy for a small child or teenager. There were no cell phones and social media, children had more freedom, and their parents, accordingly, had more space for spontaneous creativity and creativity. Nowadays, a parent has to be very careful, everything looks scary, we have to deal with complex issues such as climate change, which we do not know what consequences they can have for the future of our children. I don’t want to sound too pessimistic or negative, but this is a very scary time for both kids and parents. I think it was easier for our parents to have a more positive attitude towards life.

“He has clearly changed. When Mitterrand was elected, we also see it in the film, there was an atmosphere of renewal, a sense of newness after so many years of right-wing rule. I remember how my socialist mother was involved in humanitarian organizations and was active in society, I grew up with this mindset. My father was more politically aloof, or at least less interested in politics. Due to my age, of course, everything seemed so new and open to me then, but this is inevitably colored by the selfishness of adolescence, my first love, my first steps in the cinema.

In our time, a parent must be very careful, everything looks scary, you have to deal with difficult issues, a terrible time.

– I would not call my parents a bohemian in the most artistic sense of the word. They were very Parisian and, in my opinion, not so bohemian. My father, for example, was very fond of luxury hotels. Since his house in Paris was rather dark, he liked to get out of there and stay in hotels like the Ritz or the Raphael. He like it very much!

– Exactly! There are, of course, bohemian Parisians, let’s say bobos (s.s. bourgeois-bohemian), but my parents did not belong to them. I grew up in the very stylish 7th arrondissement of Paris, when my parents divorced my mother got a house in the also stylish 16th arrondissement. Maybe when my father died and I met Ivan, I moved a little closer to the bohemian lifestyle, as we moved around all the time. If I sit down to count, since we met, we must have moved fifteen times, all by choice, because we liked change. We continued to do this even after the birth of our son, stopping only with the birth of our first daughter.

– Yes very. Especially now. You see, when my sister died (aka Kate Barry, maternal stepmother, committed suicide), we fled to New York, where we stayed for six years, before the pandemic. My return to Paris, my new life in it, brought me back to being a daughter so literally – I made a documentary about my mother (sp.m. Charlotte’s Jane, 2021) and I am preparing to open a museum in it, which will to act in my father’s house – as well as emotionally. But even when I don’t think about it, the people around me always remind me of it. The other day a stranger approached me with a big smile on his face to tell me how much he loves my father’s songs. Incidents like this make me feel grateful for everything my parents have given me, for everything they represent not only for me but for the people who love them. It is true that my stay in New York was a kind of liberation, as for the first time in my life I found myself among people who did not know me or my parents. However, I never stopped being grateful for what they gave me, without them I wouldn’t be who I am today. I am who I am because I had such parents.