At last I got around to watching this film after all these years, the one with the song by Serge Gainsbourg where Jane Birkin makes orgasmic noises and sighs 'Je t'aime, je t'aime' to the music. And in the film she really does. But in that scene she is being buggered by a homosexual male during all of that sighing. She is not doing what people who have just heard the song all thought, and certainly not with Serge Gainsbourg, who as writer and director was behind the camera enjoying showing the world just how much he could degrade and exploit Jane on screen in fulfilment of his deeply sick fantasies. Of course Jane Birkin is entrancing, she always is, both on screen and off. But the film is odious, badly made, disgusting, pornographic, inauthentic, exploitative, demented, psychotic, and everything else. Jane spends more than half of her time on screen entirely naked, but then she is not a shy person, so presumably did not mind that. After all, she stripped off in BLOWUP without a qualm, when she was even younger. Jane's inherent physical androgyny is stressed in this weird and revolting film. Anyone watching will soon discover that Jane has never had much in the way of breasts. But that does not stop her from being intensely feminine. My wife and I have met all the Birkins, Jane's mother Judy having been our close friend. They are all unusual, let's put it that way. And unusual can mean just about anything. I found the most interesting of her three talented daughters to be Kate Barry, whose tragic death occurred not long ago. It astounds me to what an extent Jane is such a celebrity in France that they behave as if she were a goddess. Perhaps she is. Certainly I have always been mesmerised by her whenever she has spoken anything at all. What is her secret? Ah, that is the secret. But as for this film, it is best forgotten and buried in the rubbish tip which features so prominently, buzzing with flies, in the action of the film, if all that tedium can be called action.

The homosexual garbage truck driver Krassky (Joe Dallesandro) and his partner Padovan (Hugues Quester) stop at an isolated restaurant near the landfill where they work to drink a beer. They are served by the waitress Johnny (Jane Birkin) and she explains that the sleazy owner Boris (Reinhard Kolldehoff) has given that nickname to her since she wears short hair and has small breasts. Her tomboy style attracts Krassky and she has a crush on him. Boris warns her that Krassky is gay but Johnny dates him. When they go to bed, Krassky fails; however, when he sees her laying down on her face, he gets excited and sodomizes her. They start an unusual relationship while Padovan gets jealous.

"Je t'aime moi non plus" is a cult perverted romance that called the attention of Jane Birkin to the audiences in the 70's. This actress is used and abused along the shallow story and made the title song famous mainly because of her moaning and screams. This song has also become a synonym of love and eroticism. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Paixão Selvagem" ("Wild Passion")

In Serge Gainsbourg's film Je T'aime Moi Non Plus, we get to witness female masochism at its most extreme and overt, where Gainsbourg's real-life wife, the provocatively stimulating Jane Birkin, plays Johnny, who falls for Joe Dallesandro's gay boy Krassky and spends the remainder of the movie trying to satisfy him sexually, although he can only get off through anal sex, which proves to be excruciatingly painful for our heroine, who doesn't care because she loves the boy, see, and she hopes that somehow he will be transformed by her love and devotion. He's not.

What does this mean? Is it a metaphor for male/female relationships, where women are, sadly, prone to being treated like garbage by the (generally unworthy) men they love? The film doesn't offer any judgment one way or another, which of course is soooooo French, and a good thing, in actuality; the actions of the characters speak volumes without any preaching being necessary.

My IMDb rating: 7