Mylène Jampanoï

An afternoon sun bathes actress Mylène Jampanoï, who sits on a café terrace near the Marais district of Paris, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses, a studded denim jacket, loose dark trousers, and ankle boots. No surprise she’s an ambassador for Dior’s skincare products in Asia and Russia—her complexion is immaculately fresh. With her elbows on the table, she leans in intensely. “As a child, I always wanted to meet Gainsbourg; he was an idol of mine,” Jampanoï shares, regarding her role as Gainsbourg’s enigmatic lover Bambou in Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque). “The role I play is symbolic because Gainsbourg is an icon in France and Bambou was the last woman in his life. Sometimes I saw flashes [of Gainsbourg’s life] because Eric Elmosnino’s portrayal [of Gainsbourg] is dimensional, brilliant.”
    As Bambou, she appears in three scenes late in the film: dancing in the Elysée Matignon nightclub where the aging Serge Gainsbourg first comes on to her, at an auction where Gainsbourg purchases the original manuscript of La Marseillaise (the French national anthem), and in the back of a car with Gainsbourg and their baby son named Lucien (or “Lulu”) after Gainsbourg’s real first name. “Bambou remained very discreet, so there are very few images of her,” Jampanoï explains. “The three scenes in the film are the three that the French know of her.”
    As chance would have it, Jampanoï was house hunting in Corsica after making the movie and the man that she bought the property from had been Gainsbourg and Bambou’s bodyguard. (A character based on him sits between Jampanoï and Elmosnino in the auction scene.) “It’s a Corsican village of 300 inhabitants and I thought I wouldn’t see anybody from Paris,” she says. “He told me how Bambou was very addicted to drugs, and that Gainsbourg would ask him to locate her in all the cafés and clubs in Paris and bring her back.”
    Coriscan adventures and exposure to the international Parisian cinema circle are a long way from Aix-en-Provence in the South of France, where Jampanoï was raised. Born to a French mother and Chinese father, Jampanoï came to Paris at the age of 22 to look for an agent. “I come from a very poor, but happy, background,” she says.
    Her first big roles both came in 2006, first in Pan Nalin’s Valley of Flowers—“My first husband was an Indian actor [Milind Soman] that I met on the set in the Himalayas, and he was playing the main role”—and soon after she starred in The Chinese Botanist’s Daughters. Looking forward, she will appear in her first American film, Clint Eastwood’s upcoming thriller Hereafter, about various people responding to a death. “It’s a small role, of a reporter,” she says. “It’s rare that an American director comes to France to do auditions.”
    And in June, Jampanoï will begin filming as the lead in
the debut feature of Olivier Gondry, Michel’s younger brother. “It’s about a junkie in the 1980s, in the style of the Factory, who is quite austere and goes crazy,” she explains. “It’s a love story, and when she thinks she can pull herself out of her addictions, it’s too late. What’s brilliant is that it’s not a performance where you become somebody, but where you think you resemble the character. It’s a very minimalist, subtle, and nonchalant attitude, and I can be a bit rock ‘n’ roll in expressing myself.”
    After a moment of private reflection, Jampanoï reveals how she was “shocked” by the suicide of the British actress Lucy Gordon, who played Jane Birkin in Gainsbourg and to whom the film is dedicated. “She struck me as luminous, accessible, nice, smiling, joyous, beautiful, and fragile,” Jampanoï says. “She committed suicide on the eve of going to Cannes with all the other actresses to sell the film. We were all in total silence on the plane and didn’t know what to say.”
    The intensity and tragedy that was the experience of filming Gainsbourg, not to mention playing a role in a film about a national icon, has inspired Jampanoï to continue to look for challenging, difficult parts. She says her ideal role would be Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning turn as the serial killer/prostitute Aileen Wuornos in Monster. “That’s the kind of film I want to interpret,” she asserts. “I’m not after immediate success; I like the notion of getting things by merit.”

Sara Forestier

    it’s unusual for an actress to admit that she lost her cool in a scene. So Sara Forestier’s sincerity about how she was blown away by Eric Elmosnino’s performance as Serge Gainsbourg in Gainsbourg (Vie héroïque), directed by Joann Sfar, is candid and touching. In the film, Forestier plays the 16-year-old French singer France Gall, for whom Gainsbourg wrote several songs. “When he [Elmosnino] started chatting me up in the first take, I really had the impression of being chatted up by Gainsbourg,” she reveals. “He was so real and credible as Gainsbourg that I was too unsettled and couldn’t be France Gall for one or two takes and needed to gather myself!”
    It’s Friday at noon and she’s speaking at a café in St-Germain-des-Prés on Paris’ Left Bank. Forestier, 23, is wearing a dark blue, long sleeve top and blue jeans, and her hair is back to her natural brunette and above her shoulders, after having gone blonde and long for Gainsbourg. For the humorous role of Gall, she took inspiration from Sue Lyon’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita to interpret the French singer when she was a vivacious, naïve teenager dressed in a mini-skirt and knee-high socks. “I didn’t meet France Gall; she’s a different woman today,” says Forestier. “She had something when she was an adolescent—a kind of naïvety and ambiguity, while at the same time stimulating fantasies. Gainsbourg makes erotic allusions and sees France Gall’s purity and virginity, but she didn’t understand his irony. And in the second part, I sing—I had singing lessons for one month—and we were looking for something surrealist because France Gall had a graphic, exaggerated way of moving her body and shoulders.”
    So, was Forestier like her subject as a teenager? “I played football,” she replies. “But I don’t have the impression of having an adolescence. I started working very young and left school at 16 or 17.”
     Her football playing days growing up in Bastille behind her, Forestier got her big break in 2003 as the unattainably beautiful Lydia in L’esquive directed by Abdel Kechiche, which earned her a César (the French equivalent to an Oscar) for Most Promising Actress. This lead to a part playing Nick Nolte’s daughter in the award-winning A Few Days in September. Her latest movie is People’s Names, in which she plays the lead. “It’s a political and romantic comedy,” she explains. “I play a young woman who sleeps with right wing men to convert them to the left. The director, Michel Leclerc, has a universe close to Woody Allen.”
    Beyond her rangy cinematic acting ambitions, Forestier’s skills have translated to the stage, and she is currently trying her hand at directing. With two shorts and a 30-minute film under her belt, she hopes to start shooting her first feature film, which she has been writing over the last four years, later this year. “It’s a dramatic comedy about an illiterate man who stutters, and the idea is to treat the handicap with humour,” she explains. “I lived as a couple with a guy who didn’t know how to read or write. I met him when I was 15 on the Internet on a social networking site. But it’s very funny and paradoxical that his friend wrote on the keyboard. He hid [his illiteracy] and it was only six months later, when it was over, that a friend of his made a mistake by saying something.”
    Her love for the cinema extends into her free time, too, and she is constantly studying her predecessors. “I have a Blu-ray cinema screen at home, and I invite friends over every Sunday,” she says. “There are two principles to respect: watch the first film, then have tea, then watch the second film. Everybody must bring cake or drinks, and alcohol is forbidden until afterwards. And everybody coming for the first time must come back and make us discover a film—either one that we don’t know or a big classic like Chaplin.”
    And down-to-earth Forestier prefers writing and painting to partying. “I have a passion for painting African masks,” she enthuses. “I’m quite solitary actually; I like empty tearooms where you can sit and read a book. I listen to music like CocoRosie, and have a boyfriend. I don’t have much time to go to parties.”