E-Mail This Article to a Friend Francophone sex Jane Birkin at long last comes to Boston BY MICHAEL FREEDBERG

For the first time in her 40-year career as an actress and chanteuse, Jane Birkin is coming to Boston to perform. This Saturday at the Berklee Performance Center, she will present her selection of the many, many songs that Serge Gainsbourg — for years her husband, the father of her daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, and a musical polymath — wrote for her. Included will likely be "Amours des feintes," "Couleur Café," "Baby Alone in Babylone," "L’aquoiboniste," "Comment te dire adieu," and the pair’s one American pop hit, "Je t’aime . . . moi non plus," which shocked 1969 audiences with its graphic depictions of sexual passion but which in 1975 served as the foundation for Giorgio Moroder & Donna Summer’s steamy disco hit "Love To Love You Baby."

Birkin’s part in these songs is anything but second fiddle. "Je t’aime," for example was at first offered to Brigitte Bardot, who recorded it but then refused to permit its release; now available, her performance sounds disinterested in comparison with Birkin’s. Yet when I get her on the phone, all Birkin wants to discuss is "Serge." Their affair began when she — the daughter of a Royal Navy commander and British actress Judy Campbell — was 21 and he 40. She’d already appeared in a famous nude scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. That and her collaboration Gainsbourg made her famous. She has now been a star of French variété — an all-encompassing term for French pop from Edith Piaf and Gainsbourg to Mylene Farmer and Miss Kittin — for 35 years, the last 13 on her own since Serge’s death. "I think Serge’s songs give me my longevity. He was as great a lyricist as Apollinaire or Trenet; Serge’s words are even more sophisticated, like Cole Porter’s. His was an extraordinary talent, like Lerner and Loewe. I have been lucky to be there."

She’s right about Gainsbourg’s talent. He wrote the words and the music; he perfected the bi-lingual pun (even the trilingual), which is now a staple of the best variété songs. Women were his muse, and he understood the intricacy, the contradiction, the intensity and the delicacy of feminine expression. Yet Birkin’s voice has been just as influential in shaping today’s variété. She was a child of the microphone era, when a singer could deliver intimacy with an irresistible hush. It’s impossible to listen even to the newest variété chanteuse, Miss Kittin, without hearing something of Birkin’s lilting, bird-with-a-broken-wing voice.

Prodded, Birkin does at last talk about that voice. "He wrote songs for me as if he were a girl understanding his female side. I was to him a good inspiring force. He liked my having a boy’s voice. He used to say I sang like a choirboy! It gave him the idea that he was giving songs to a boy!" Does she mean that the immortal "Je t’aime" was one of these songs? Given by a man expressing his feminine side to a girl whom he sees as a choirboy, male and underage? I don’t dare ask so crass a question, but as the French say, "Le cœur a ses raisons que le raison ne sait pas" ("The heart has its reasons that reason does not know"), and Birkin’s idea — which had never crossed my mind, though I’ve been listening to variété for 20 years — conveys everything she means to say about the profundity of Gainsbourg’s understanding of women and the mystery of sexual attraction.

It also unravels some of the mysteries of modern variété. At the beginning of her 1987 hit "Sans contrefaçon," Mylene Farmer in the persona of a young girl asks, "Maman, pourquoi je suis pas un garcon?", then goes on to dress herself as a boy. Something similar seems to be going on in France Gall’s famous "Mademoiselle Chang," which she performs with such quiet intensity on Simple je (WEA), the two-CD set taken from her 1997 concert at Bercy Arena in Paris. The same theme pops up on Indochine’s 1980s hit "3ème sexe," a new version of which one finds on Miss Kittin’s I.com (Astralwerks) CD. And in American pop, especially soul music, in which sexual passion has always played a liberating role: Prince’s "If I Was Your Girlfriend" and Al Green singing Lulu’s "To Sir, with Love." It would be hard to imagine a rocker singing such songs except as a burlesque.

The love affair between Birkin and Gainsbourg ended in 1981 (she married French film director Jacques Doillon in 1982) but not their musical teamwork. "I introduced Alain Chamfort [another variété singer/writer] to Serge, but he wouldn’t let me sing a Chamfort song. Or a Léo Ferré. ‘No, she’s mine,’ he told Ferré. He said to me, ‘You don’t have to sing anybody else’s songs.’ "

And for a long time after Gainsbourg’s death, she did not. Still, there was nothing she could add to her Serge performances after Je suis venue de te dire que je m’en vais ("I’ve come to tell you I’m going away"; Polydor), the concert recorded live at Le Casino de Paris two days after his death. There, backed by a band who for grit, beat, blues expression, and melody have had few equals, Birkin sang a full two hours of Serge songs with a desperate intensity, as if her "boy’s voice" could will back to life the feminine profundity of his art. On the CD of the concert, all of that plus Birkin’s tears and two minutes of silence are preserved. "It was an appalling time," she says about those last weeks before Gainsbourg died, during which he advised her about the concert and recording. "Serge was there with his cigarette lighter. He said he’ll make me sing at night. I said I can’t sing a record at night." As for the Casino de Paris concert itself, "Serge decided what I was to do on that show. My father had just died too. My mom said, ‘You have to go through with it, no encores, put the mike on the ground, walk off.’ Serge too told me how to get through it."

Birkin continues to perform Gainsbourg, and in collaboration with Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles (who will perform with her at Berklee), she put together the 2002 disc Arabesque (Narada), on which in response to the growing alienation of the European and Arabic worlds she repositioned many of her Gainsbourg hits (and some newer songs) in an Arabic pop context. She has just finished a 45-country tour. "We went to Turkey, Hong Kong, Israel. ‘Of course we must go to Israel,’ Djamel said. ‘Serge was Jewish, Israelis speak French.’ Palestine, Japan. I wanted to go to Kyiv, where Serge was born. I’m going there in February. I would have liked to go to Texas!"

The Arabesque CD and tour have been "a success all over Asia — 2000 people a night at our two Hong Kong shows wasn’t bad," she boasts. And there has been more. On her 1999 CD À la légère ("Thoughtlessly"; Polydor), she performed songs by a who’s who of variété songwriters including old friends Alain Chamfort and Alain Souchon and the younger Etienne Daho, Art Mengo, MC Solaar, Marc Lavoine, and Miossec. She especially likes Miossec: "He’s as shy as Serge, with lyrics of vast complication." On her new Rendez-vous (EMI), she teams with many of her À la légère collaborators as well as Manu Chao, Caetano Veloso, Bryan Ferry (!), the veteran Paolo Conte, Brian Molko, and a young chanteur named "Mickey" who sounds a lot like Jean-Louis Murat, one of the most exciting male voices in today’s variété. In addition, Françoise Hardy joins Birkin on the sardonically titled "Surannée" ("Outdated").

Birkin will not — so the advance notices say — perform any of her new songs here in Boston. But her Serge will be here, and that, for this first Birkin visit, will be enough. The sexual riddles that they first expressed 35 years ago still have the power to amaze and unsettle. And since Birkin — now 57 years old, but looking 35 — was born in England, she will be able to comment, in between songs, on the meaning of her music in a language we will all understand.

Jane Birkin performs this Saturday, November 13, at 8 p.m. at the Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Avenue in Boston; call (617) 876-4275.