The French Institute Alliance Francaise, over the course of last month, held a retrospective of acclaimed French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg’s films. I was originally scheduled to attend all of them, but due to various circumstances, I only found myself in their deep (and I mean deep) underground movie theater for Charlotte For Ever, a film made by Gainsbourg’s father, the “dirty old man” of ’60s French pop music.

I was fully aware of the film’s plot beforehand, which follows a suicidal alcoholic French screenwriter named Stan (Serge Gainsbourg) who, upon killing his wife in a rather violent car accident involving a huge oil truck, turns to his daughter Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg, of course) for “comfort.” What initially begins as a somewhat creepy but fairly harmless relationship between father and daughter soon turns in a much more perverse direction. Many of the elderly people in the audience, who clearly did not know what they were getting themselves into, did not approve.

Later introducing the Leon (Roland Bertin) as Stan’s friend, who also apparently has a somewhat inappropriate thing for Charlotte, the plot begins to fluctuate between an honest portrait of forbidden sexual attraction and something I can’t particularly articulate into words. Soft-core porn? Dark chamber drama? Pseudo-incestual meandering French film? This film operates under many masks, but none for a fairly extended period of time.

The majority of the film takes place in Stan and Charlotte’s home, which seems to be something akin to a Victorian Gothic mansion, as it’s always inexplicably dark and gloomy inside, no matter the time of day. Occasional, repeated flashbacks to fly-overs of the fiery car crash that took Stan’s wife and Charlotte’s mother jolt us out of the dark and mysterious lull that the film evokes on its viewers, but other than that, not much happens. Stan becomes increasingly more violent, drunk and suicidal, and occasionally sleeps with Charlotte’s teenage friends to her disapproval and eventual jealousy. There’s also a random part with a morbidly obese prostitute that doesn’t really serve much of a purpose. I don’t know why it was even included.

Honestly, I don’t really know what to make of this film. Between the repeated lecherous shots of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s bare breasts and its meandering plot, I’m not sure if I should label it as one of those peculiar — and, to a certain degree, untouchable — French dramas or as a piece of schlock that glorifies incest for the sake of shock value. The latter position is what many French critics took when the film was released, despite Serge insisting that there was much more to the film than that. Perhaps there is, but I certainly didn’t pick up on it, and I don’t plan on revisiting it to find out (not that I could — it’s out of print).

As the lights came up, all of the elderly people began to murmur to each other about the film’s events before proceeding to get the hell out of the theater as fast as they could. I’ve never felt such a thick blanket of awkwardness come over a theater before in my time as a reviewer, and hopefully it doesn’t resurface to this magnitude again — at least while I’m there. I probably should have seen the Varda film Kung-fu Master!, also out of print, that was screened the week after, but oh well. What is done is done. I’d like to thank Charlotte For Ever, however, for two things: making it so I’ll never look at the Gainsbourg family in the same light ever again, and for significantly scarring me for life. At least it was capable of doing that much.