SMOOCH
By the time the pandemic was over, I’d absorbed enough 1980s French videos on YouTube that I’d decided on a new identity for myself: barfly in a no-account watering hole.
Un autre, s’il vous plait!
Serge Gainsbourg
“Mon Légionnaire”
the ideal bar: all races spontaneous dancing arm-wrestling, card games unimaginative drinks
Serge Gainsbourg in “Mon Légionnaire”
(Dir. Henri Legoy, 1989)
Years have passed, but Serge Gainsbourg’s recollection of his passionate night with a golden-haired soldier is as fresh as a pack of Gitanes dropped down from the machine.
Sounding nothing less than postcoital, Serge describes the soldier’s gorgeous skin, sensational lovemaking, and stealthy departure.
The video for “Mon Légionnaire” was a major inspiration behind my planned lifestyle change. It’s set in a bar that discourages conversation, even if you know everyone there.
The sullen camaraderie is disturbed when the solider shows up, years later, remote as ever.
“Mon légionnaire!” Serge sighs.
Edith Piaf, the previously undisputed guardian of “Mon Légionnaire,” sang it with dignity and fond remembrance. Gainsbourg’s version makes you want to slip the légionnaire your number.
égionnaire n’t resist the song’s brisk and horny call to the bar floor, if only to make Serge jealous — a classic move some of us may have pulled off once or tw
In real life Gainsbourg was a ladies’ man, to put it mildly. That he recorded “Mon Légionnaire” from a man’s point of view, then released an equally homoerotic video for it*, was predictably scandalous and seriously titillating, whether anyone chose to admit it or not.
I, for one, wanted in:
to the bar, the beer, the quiet, the heat.
SMOOCH
Catherine Lowe
Text, design, photos by
*Page 8: Gainsbourg made two videos for “Mon Légionnaire,” but the one directed by Luc Besson, also in 1989, isn’t nearly as good.
