While its football team somehow managed to make even more of a spectacle of itself than ours did in South Africa, France can at least take cinematic comfort in a different kind of enfant terrible later this month. Here in all his insouciant glory is Serge Gainsbourg, captured on the new quad for Gainsbourg, Joann Sfar's film of his tumultuous life.
The biopic charts Gainsbourg’s (Eric Elmosnino) life from childhood in a Jewish family coping with the Nazi occupation of Paris to his rise to pop star and all-round poster boy for Gallic cool, to his death in 1991. When he wasn't dating astonishing-looking women, he was known for his musical shapeshifting, morphing effortlessly from jazz to pop to reggae and eventually electronica. And for smoking loads and loads of fags.
Character-wise, **Gainsbourg *is a Who's Who of icons, including exes Brigitte Bardot (Laetitia Casta), Jane Barkin (Lucy Gordon) and the singer's last partner, Bambou (Mylène Jampanoï).
**Gainsbourg **is out in cinemas on July 30.
Bizarrely, obscure fact fans, she was the granddaughter of Friedrich von Paulus, the German general who surrendered at Stalingrad and man at least partly responsible for Enemy At The Gates.