Coming of age: The prime of Ms. Jane Birkin

Bruce Emond The Jakarta Post Jakarta

Srebrenica, Rwanda, Israel, Ramallah: The names pour out in a breathy torrent and in the space of a few minutes, Jane Birkin has taken the listener on a dizzying tour of the world's tragic hot spots, past and present.

Impassioned and compassionate, she rattles off a list of sad facts on the cruelty of humankind, the calculated indifference of governments to the genocides occurring around them.

At 57, the actress-cum-singer seems to have come of age, far removed from the shy, skinny young British model who pranced naked in the definitive swinging 60's movie Blow Up, moaned her way through the notorious single Je t'aime moi non plus with French music's enfant terrible Serge Gainsbourg and then became identified as his "muse".

Birkin does not sound like she is spouting celebrity serious- speak (she goes off on too many tangents to be a PR talking head), or that she is providing a token lending of her name to a trendy humanitarian cause. It comes across instead as that very English empathy for the downtrodden and the injured, the girl who stood up to the schoolyard bully -- or wanted to -- now talking back to the global big boys.

She has been an activist for many years, including supporting immigrant and prisoner rights in France, and setting off to see the killing fields of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia for herself.

It's that same concern for humanity, the undaunted hope that good will somehow triumph over evil, that comes through at the core of her Arabesque tour. Armed with the alternately brooding and impish songs of Gainsbourg, the great love of her life, she took her show on the road, spreading her word of togetherness from New York to London to Lisbon, with a stop in Jakarta this week.

"I will leave here, but I'll take the memory of your sweet faces with me, that's what we need, to see our faces, to know each other," Birkin said at the end of her concert, sponsored by Centre Culturel Francais, at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta on Thursday.

The tour has been a success with critics and audiences alike, with Djamel Benyelles innovative rearrangement of Gainsbourg's songs with Arab and gypsy musical influences perfectly suiting Birkin's delicate, reedy vocals. Arabesque has sold more than 100,000 albums in France alone.

During her performance on Thursday, Birkin was in her element, conversing between songs in both English and French (with some brave attempts at Indonesian), flitting around the stage and planting kisses on the cheeks of Benyalles and the three other musicians as the urge took her.

"It's been so unexpected, because we started this tour in Algeria just when they had the floods in Bab El Oued (November 2001), so it was a rather human beginning to something human in sadness, in the way that people who have suffered always understand other people who have suffered," she said during an interview.

They returned to France, playing to packed houses at the Paris Odeon, before the concert series was picked up by manager Olivier Gluzman, known for his unusual coterie of musical performers. He was able to slot them into his established roster of performance venues around Europe and the United States.

Even in the U.S., where Birkin is not the household name she is in France, and in Britain, where she is perhaps still best known as the upper-crust girl who went off to France and made that risque song, they were well received.

"What was unexpected was to get the extraordinary reception we got in New York, with something where, after all, you had a mixture of Arab (musicians) and a turncoat Englishwoman, in that I was against Bush and the (Iraq) war ..." Birkin said.

"In England, it was just the same -- we got four and five stars ... It's always interesting to know that people aren't necessarily like their leaders."

Except for Birkin's reading of a poem written in English by her late nephew Anno, a musician who was killed in a car accident at the age of 20, the show's songs are entirely in French, but Arabesque has traveled well even among non-Francophones.

Arabesque, she said, evolved into more than just a music tour, because "just by the fact of being there, it made people just a bit happier than the hour and a half before they came ..."

Self-deprecating to a fault, she is quick to credit Benyelles and the late Gainsbourg for all the success.

"A lot of it has to do with Djamel, because of his orchestrations, it's made it possible for us to go worldwide," she said.

"It's not necessary to understand the French. If you can, it's wonderful, but we just came back from Hong Kong where they translated all Serge's lyrics with great care, and I saw people reading them and I thought, 'help, they must be bored and wondering when it ends', but that was not it at all ...

"We were sold out on the two nights in Hong Kong, which apparently is a rarity ..."

Due to her residing in France since the late 1960s and her acting and music career in that country, many people assume she is French. Her quirky Englishness notwithstanding, she has endeared herself as an "adopted daughter" in the country over the last 30 years.

"I like the fact of belonging to both. I criticize the French, I criticize the English, I love the French, I love the English, in my own funny way," she said.

"I like the fact that you can speak out (in France), that you pay your taxes; (revenue from) one out of two of these shows goes straight to income tax, so I can certainly speak out ..."

Her long relationship with Gainsbourg, 20 years her senior, is another reason for her special place in the French public's hearts. She was coming off a failed marriage with composer John Barry and he had broken up with Brigitte Bardot when they met while making a film together.

Bardot would have been a tough act to follow for any woman, but Birkin and Gainsbourg embarked on a relationship that was, by all accounts, deeply loving despite all its tumult. After the scandal accompanying Je t'aime moi non plus, Birkin was tagged with the ambivalent "muse" label, a Trilby to his Svengali, the naive but willing instrument for a brilliant artist who was fast losing the plot.

That is the enduring public perception of their relationship, but Birkin tells a simpler, poignant story of two sad souls finding themselves during a rough period in their lives.

"Serge wrote beautiful songs for me ... We were both hurt, because Bardot had left him, and John Barry had left me, and we clung together like limpets with my daughter Kate (from Barry). We comforted each other. That's a side that people don't really think about him...."

He shaped her career as an actress and singer -- "I could have been one of those James Bond poppets" -- and built up her admittedly low self-esteem, despite coming from what she describes as a loving family.

"He told me it didn't matter that I didn't have bosoms, he told me that I was pretty, he told me that I was what he had imagined when he drew at art school. After a broken marriage, after boarding school, that gave me confidence," she said.

Seeing her as a pliant pawn for Gainsbourg's grand designs also fails to acknowledge that it was she who left him in 1980, taking their daughter Charlotte (now an actress) and setting up a home of her own.

She had an affair at the time with the director Jacques Doillon, by whom she has a daughter, Lou, but Birkin attributes the breakup with Gainsbourg to her moving on to another stage in her life.

"It amused him (Serge) to have someone who looked pretty. He wrote a lot of songs for me, we had fun, we had our life together, we had Charlotte especially. And then I found myself at that age in life when I thought I didn't fit in with what he wanted me to be, and I was just unhappy and one day I just walked away ... People leave for many reasons ... "

They remained friends, and Gainsbourg wrote Baby Alone in Babylone for her in 1983, which devoted fans of the couple consider his homage to his lost love and critics say is Birkin's best work.

"He wrote the most beautiful, interesting songs for me on that album," Birkin said. "I was probably expressing his pain, he, probably like many writers, had found me his voice to express his feminine side. It was like having an A side and a B side, and I think I was his B side.

"That let him clown around on television, but I said his other feelings that were pretty sad ..."

The irony was that, as Gainsbourg fought his own demons, Birkin, bimbette no more, became recognized for both her music and acting, including the critically praised The Pirate made with Doillon; Hermes even made a bag in her honor.

She went on to make her first concert appearance in 1987, and has since acted extensively in plays and movies, among them her acclaimed performances in Daddy Nostalgia (1991) and Merci Dr. Rey (2002).

She is in her prime now, with the Arabesque tour set to wind up at Carnegie Hall in New York City later this year and an offer to play Gertrude in Hamlet at Britain's National Theater. "I think for my age, to be asked to do more things than when you were 25 is very lucky," she said.

Again, she speaks wistfully about Gainsbourg, who died in 1991, saying that he was the best French writer since the shortlived poet Guillaume Apollinaire in the early 20th century. The devoted muse to the last, she is carefully safeguarding his legacy.

And that will always include the little number, banned by the BBC and condemned by the Vatican, that started it all for them way back in 1969.

"I know that when I go out feet first, that song will be played on the news, because there can't be many songs that have gone to number one but been bought under the table or banned by the Pope, but then turned out to be one of the most beautiful love songs," Birkin said.

"That's my theme song."