Serge Gainsbourg’s Crackpot- Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus- At The Quad

            Playing at the Quad cinema on October 11^th is a 4k restoration of a loony, little-seen 1976 film by Serge Gainsbourg that plays like the ultimate anti-erotic crackpot romance. Set in American, but feeling like it’s unfolding on another planet, studly Joe Dallesandro plays Krassky, a gay garbage man driving a Mack truck with his hot-headed boyfriend- Padovan (Hugues Quester). They roll up to truck-stop and Krassky becomes enamored of the boyish-looking waitress there named Johnny (Jane Birkin), which makes the boyfriend insanely jealous. Boris (Reinhard Kolldhoff) is Johnny’s brutal, farting boss who disapproves by saying, “Queers- I can smell them 20 yards away.” But Krassky & Johnny’s romantic trysts are usually interrupted when her screams of pain get them thrown out of hotels. (He can only make love to her by fucking her up the ass.)

A young Gerard Depardieu plays a saintly figure riding a white horse who smells his fingers after grabbing his crotch. He tells a flirting Padovan he probably shouldn’t screw him because his “tool” has hospitalized too many guys already. A Saturday night dance is interrupted by women who are forced to do a humiliating strip tease. Gainsbourg was a real Renaissance man- he was a songwriter, poet, painter, author- he wrote and directed this film and composed the jaunty piano score and the lilting theme song “Je T’aime” which was a hit in France and banned in other countries because of its slyly suggestive lyrics.

When I managed a movie theater on Cape Cod our Boston booker sent us this film to play for a week in the fall in order to gauge responses, and audiences were pleasantly baffled and amused by it. It is the damnedest thing you’ve ever seen, and you often wonder what they were smoking when they made it. Birkin and Dallesandro are just gorgeous though- just watching them floating naked in a lake on an inner tube is what makes going to the movies worthwhile.