Such is the dilemma when you’re the daughter of British actress/singer/Hermes Birkin bag, Jane Birkin and revered French Indie film director, Jacques Doillon. “It’s true that, as a little girl…I wanted to be a muse and at the same time I had so much ego that I couldn’t stand the idea of being a man’s object. I’ve always had a strange time deciding if I was a muse or if I was a creator. For me a muse is a woman, in a strange way, or a creator is a man.”
After having been the face for Givenchy, featuring in campaigns for some of the world’s largest fashion houses and starring in over 20 movies, Doillon now sits firmly in the creator’s seat with the release of her debut album Places. It’s a brooding, intimate folk collection about love, obsession and regret. The album has already been met with critical acclaim collecting her the award for Female Artist of the Year at the French equivalent of the Grammy’s: Les Victoires de la Musique. Not bad for an album sung entirely in English.
This whirlwind success has shot from strength to strength as Doillon gushes it’s “absolutely insane in the year of your 30th birthday when you thought it was over” to receive a second award. It was merely two weeks later when the French government extended to her an invitation to be a knight of the L’Un de l’Etre: The Knighthood of French Authors. Not bad for a student who left school at 15.
On growing up, she cites a big regret about not having finished her studies. “If I’d done the studies I wanted to do, I think I’d be a kind of strange researcher. A bit like my uncle, Andrew Birkin. I love mathematics and history and learning so I guess I would’ve been a scholar one way or another. Which is strange because I was a very, very bad pupil but in fact I have always fantisised about university.”
The embodiment of yet another contradiction, a scholar she is. An avid reader of poetry and literature, (citing Dorothy Parkins as one of her favourites), Lou insists that there’s a level of curiosity to be maintained among us. “I think that’s the real thing: It’s to be inspired to be inspiring and be inspiring to be inspired and that’s it, I mean it’s this kind of circle”, she says.
Following the death of her cousin in early life, Doillon went on to a highly publicised period of adolescent ‘wild child’ ways. It’s clear that this album, among many things, marks the end of that chapter: some closure to a time when she admits to being too hard on herself. “It’s true that if I was to do it again I would do it exactly the same because I think that Places, for example, would’ve been impossible without the past 15 years. People say to me ‘Why didn’t you do an album when you were 18?’ I had nothing to say when I was 18 and I would’ve had a stupid little shrill voice trying to please whoever was in the room…”
Forever in control, the Lou Doillon of today is confident and unaffected on the phone. Perfectly unsuppressed, in an English accent that puts a reformed Eliza Doolittle to shame, she explains the process of maturation. “The success of this album is based on the fact that I never tried to seduce anyone. That I did, what I found, was the best for me. That it was an album that’s not cool, or hyped or trendy. I thought, ‘it’s not now that you’ve got success that you’re going to start pleasing people’.”
Since its release and subsequent success, the album has reiterated Doillon’s influence as somewhat of a role model for women. There’s lament in her voice as she talks of the perception of women and beauty in today’s cultures. “Society is making us completely paranoid and shaky. Everyone is scared by someone who’s scared”, she notes.
Instead of beautiful models, she offers we should be taking heed from other less typically feminine types: “You go and see Patti Smith backstage, who nearly has a moustache, she’s got one eye looking out the opposite way to the other eye, she looks like a granny on crack, surrounded by 6 of the most beautiful men you’ve ever seen, who are all in love with her and you think: ‘My God, Patti you’ve got it!’”
And what’s her advice for that girl that waited all those years ago atop the streets of Paris? “Just give me a French kiss and say ‘It’s all going to settle. It will all make sense one day’”, she laughs.
BY ISABELLA UBALDI
