I heart 'Je T'aime Moi Non Plus'

ASKED ABOUT JE T'aime Moi Non Plus a few years ago, erstwhile Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro had this to say: "The whole story of the movie is that I'm after this girl who looks like a boy because I want to give her a good butt-fucking. Um, not as unclassy as that, though."

No doctoral thesis could better encompass the flummoxing simplicity of this 1976 push of the cinematic envelope, a European succès de scandale that was barely seen in North America and never released to home video. Vivid memories, bootleg copies, and writer-director Serge Gainsbourg's posthumous position as desiccated groom doll atop the retro-pop Francophilia cake have kept Je T'aime a favorite esoteric cultural reference point even among people who haven't actually seen it.

They'll be lining the staircase at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend as a three-day run of the elusive movie ends visual virginity for those who've been aurally taken by Serge more times than can be counted. "Je T'aime Moi Non Plus" started, of course, in 1968 as the ultimate Swinging Sixties transgression – four minutes of loping groove over which composer, singer, and all-around Dorian Gray manqué (in "after" form) Gainsbourg coaxed actress, vocalist, and superchick Jane Birkin into protesting ecstasies of climax after climax. It is, reputedly, the only song to have been publicly condemned by a Pope.

Eight years later there was still quite enough mileage in that title, not to mention Gainsbourg and Birkin's status as the Continent's most decadent couple, to float his first directorial project. Neither were strangers to the medium: Beyond Gainsbourg's popularity on the charts, in concerts, on TV, and anywhere he went with Brigitte Bardot (his pre-Jane muse), Serge had been a soundtrack composer and actor since 1959. (Leaving little division between art and life, his roles had included "Strange Man," de Sade, and Monsieur Drugstore.) Birkin had accumulated a rather amazing multinational screen résumé only somewhat overshadowed by her tendency to appear nude at every possible opportunity.

Given those track records, nothing about Je T'aime should have been that shocking; but all concerned outdid themselves. Set in a southern France that looks more like the armpit of flattest Nevada, the film filters the rube acrobatics of concurrent Yankee hits Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Bobbi Joe and the Outlaw through transatlantic mescaline. Instead of car chases, gay garbage collectors Krassky (Dallesandro) and Padovan (Hughes Quester) hydraulically unload hitchhikers from their dump truck when one makes a homophobic remark. Instead of buddies fighting over the Girl, mad-jealous Padovan and pixie-cut, boyishly underdeveloped truck stop waitress Johnny (Birkin) fight over Krassky, who – as in Little Joe's Warhol films – is the surly object of all desires.

Part Gallic drive-in yukfest ("So I have gas" shrugs Johnny's loutish, farting boss, "So does champagne – who cares?"), part rough-trade fantasia (à la '70s gay porn classic Kansas City Trucking Co.), part Eurotrash objet d'art, Je T'aime is at once obsessive and cool, squalid and business-as-usual. As Dallesandro (who in a brief phone chat last week called it "still a pretty sexy movie") opined above, the barely-there plot is driven by, as much as anything, his character's preference to ride Johnny's back road. This invariably sets her to howling so loud they get thrown out of the direst flophouses. In another tender moment, they go on a roller derby date, where the Amazons on wheels prompt her to ask, "Are those girls?" "Like you're a guy," he says, leaning in for a kiss.

Love surely meant never having to say you're sorry for these characters, and for Gainsbourg as well, who died in 1991 of "natural causes" hastened by every unnatural substance known to man. About to hit the Hershey highway, crass Joe further elaborates, "Love is a blind man and he has a candy-colored cane." More succinctly, he later plucks, then gulps, a bit of personal earwax to inform Johnny – who's about to see his backside for the last time, walking away – "See this? This is life. Bitter." (Dennis Harvey)

'Je T'aime Moi Non Plus' runs Thurs/20-Sat/22, 7:30 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts screening room, 701 Mission, SF. $5-$8. (415) 978-2787, www.ybca.org.