French women. Wow. One would prefer to believe it’s all a cliche: the black
eyeliner, the Gitanes purr, the
wind-you-round-their-chipped-Chanel-nail-varnished-little-finger pout. Except
here I am, perched at one end of a sofa in a studio in the 11th arrondissement
of Paris with Joséphine de La Baume curled up at the other end, a one-woman
forcefield of feline, Gallic charm. The slow smile, the sleepy, half-closed
eyes, the hand absent-mindedly raking hair off her face. She has an easy
sensuality that – seemingly without trying – casts the bronzed, hard-bodied,
Americanised version of hotness into the shade.
But you know what? It’s actually a total drag, being young Hollywood’s go-to
French Dream Girl. “I always get the girl who is French and liberated and
stylised. I dream of playing a girl who is a tomboy, tough, in the mud; but no.
Never.” De La Baume pouts, then laughs. “I’m lucky if someone offers me a part
where I don’t have to smoke and drink wine in every scene.” It’s a hard life,
right? But then, as de La Baume adds, “On the other hand, I do get to be grumpy
and feisty and a pain in the ass, because that’s very French.”
De La Baume has strawberry-blond hair, long and vaguely unkempt, messily
centre-parted in the Saint-Germain art student style. Her hazel eyes are flecked
with so much gold, they look almost amber. She has incredible cheekbones and
disarmingly normal teeth (Vanessa Paradis is the same). On a cool spring day,
she wears a shaggy, 70s-style purple coat over a well-worn Alexander McQueen
sweater with buttons missing at the cuffs, and faded J Brand jeans. On her hands
there are a cluster of rings with motifs of lips or snakes. “It’s fun to wear
something womanly and glamorous to a premiere, and to play the game,” she says.
“But in real life I am quite tomboyish: I wear a lot of shirts, T-shirts, always
boots.” Like every good Parisienne of this decade, her favourite label is Hedi
Slimane’s Saint Laurent.
De La Baume has more about her than the picture captions on the social
pages and men’s magazines would have you believe
In Listen Up Philip, the new film by 31-year-old Brooklyn film-making
wonderkid Alex Ross Perry, de La Baume joins a heavyweight cast that includes
Jason Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss and Jonathan Pryce. It’s an angst-ridden New
York comedy, very much in the Woody Allen tradition, down to the West Village
bicycle rides set to jazz saxophone and self-obsessed men having verbose
tantrums in paperback-lined apartments. De La Baume plays the gorgeous
bluestocking, Yvette. “It’s a French-girl part, of course. He [Schwartzman] even
says in the movie, ‘I always wanted a French girlfriend.’ But I liked that she
was more than just the fantasy of a French woman. She’s romantic, but she’s also
an achiever.”
As is de La Baume, when you scratch the surface. You know how one inevitably
judges people, to a certain extent, by the people they are married to? Four
years ago, de La Baume, now 30, married the musician and DJ Mark Ronson; before
that, she starred in advertising campaigns for lingerie brand Agent Provocateur.
So far, so predictably rock-star-marries-model. Well, put it like this: after
spending a little time with de La Baume, my opinion of Ronson has risen
noticeably. She’s got more about her than the picture captions on the social
pages and men’s magazines would have you believe. (Mea culpa, for reading them.)
First there is an acting career that began with French period drama The Princess
Of Montpensier in 2010, and has included roles in One Day and Johnny English
Reborn; then de La Baume makes up half, with her brother Alexandre, of the band
Singtank, whose debut album gained a four-star review in this newspaper in 2012
(“a sherbert lemon of a debut album, sweet and tart in all the right places and
measures”).
The trailer for de La Baume’s new film, Listen Up Philip.
Back, briefly, to those social pages. Of all the articles I read about de La
Baume before meeting her, one particular headline stuck in my head for its pure
silliness: “Socialite Hurt During Sail”, as reported in NY Post’s Page Six
gossip column in January 2012. The piece referred to a minor back complaint
suffered by Ronson’s mother, Ann Dexter-Jones, during a Mexican sailing holiday
in the company of her son and daughter-in-law, and Joséphine’s parents, named in
the item as “Baron and Baronne de La Baume”. Vanity Fair, meanwhile, included de
La Baume and her “freight-inspection fortune” in a portfolio on heirs and
heiresses. So, is she very, very posh? “Baron doesn’t mean anything in France.
This is a republic. A title doesn’t mean anything here, and it hasn’t for years
and years.” Her father is an ex-investment banker who owns a theatre, while her
mother runs a charity. “It’s an old French family, but it’s not aristocratic.
It’s a family of lawyers, really, nothing special. My parents are more
intellectuals than anything, and they are interested in culture and ideas. They
are very low-key people, not extravagant. They are in their 70s now, but they
both still work. They spend their time going to the theatre, that sort of
thing.”
One member of her family about whom de La Baume is happy to riff is her
grandmother. It is a story so femme fatale, so fabulously mythic and cinematic,
that it must be at least partly embellished, but it bears repeating. As de La
Baume tells it, Suzanne Salmanowicz was a beautiful teenage bride when her
husband was called up to fight at the beginning of the second world war. Pining
for him, she joined the resistance, travelled to Africa in pursuit of him, and
ended up on an army boat, which was torpedoed. “After two days swimming
together, her husband sank in front of her, but she kept swimming. The next day,
she got bitten by a shark. But – this is the funny part of the story – she was,
how do you say, coquette? She liked to look nice, and she had had the coat lined
and tailored to make it a better shape. And she always said that that had saved
her ass, because the shark mostly bit her coat.” (A morality tale in defence of
perfectly fitting clothes: so French.)
Stripe shirt, £465, by JW Anderson, from stylebop.com. Blazer, from a
selection, 31philliplim.com. Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Photographer’s
assistant: Linda Giezendanner. Hair: Nao Kawakami at Saint Luke. Makeup: Anthony
Preel at Airport Agency. Photograph: Wendelin Spiess for the Guardian
Eventually saved by an English boat, Suzanne then fell in love with her
commanding general, who was “married and a womaniser. And she was supposed to go
on a spy mission to jump out of a plane next to a concentration camp, but right
before, she found out she was pregnant – that was with my mum – so she didn’t
go. Everyone on that mission was killed. So, my mum saved her life, in a way.”
De La Baume wants to make a movie about her grandmother’s life, one day. I get
the impression casting the main role will be relatively straightforward.
Joséphine is the third of her mother’s four children. “‘The first one from
the second bed’ is what my mum says. Very French. So my parents were quite old
when they had me. Now I can see that I was lucky. It was actually a very
interesting childhood, but at the time I was like, for fuck’s sake, another
classical music concert? Can’t you take me to, like, Michael Jackson for
once?”
She and her younger brother Alexandre “started playing music as a way just to
spend time together. And then I was going to acting school and he was working in
movie production. Music was just something we did for fun.” But in London,
Joséphine had “met some people in music, and stuff like that”, so they sent some
music to producer Nellee Hooper, who ended up producing their first album; their
second, Ceremonies, was released last year. Now music is as important to her as
acting: “I can’t imagine doing one without the other.” When I ask what projects
she is working on, she talks about playing the second album live this summer
before getting to any upcoming movie projects (which include an Amanda Sthers
film co-starring with Rossy de Palma and Rosanna Arquette).
Modelling, on the other hand, she is keen to distance herself from. “I never
considered myself a model. I had started acting and doing music, and then I got
hired for fashion jobs, so I always felt like I was being hired as Joséphine.
Especially since they would have to resize everything.” (She is 5ft 4in, with
splendid curves.) “I could do one day of modelling and live on that money while
I made a film. That was what I liked about modelling, really.” And the Agent
Provocateur brand, she says, is about more than just knickers. “Through the
women they work with – from Kylie Minogue, who is so tiny, to Maggie Gyllenhaal
– they celebrate different definitions of beauty. It’s about being comfortable
with who you are, and that’s important. Am I a feminist? Of course! It would be
ridiculous to be a woman and not to be a feminist. There is absolutely nothing
negative about a word that means you care about other women and their rights.
For as long as there is inequality in the world, it is really important that
every woman is a feminist.”
De La Baume’s home with Ronson is in Notting Hill, but she has kept her
flat in Paris (“It’s just, like, a basement”), because she is back and forth,
most recently filming a French TV series, “a comedy, set in the secret service
in the 60s”. Meanwhile, Ronson (who speaks French “a little… he tries”) lives
between London and the US. He “helped a bit” on the second Singtank album, but
“we didn’t physically work together because he worked from a studio in London
and we were in Paris. That’s probably for the best, right?” Their life in London
revolves around watching movies – “He is a huge, huge cinephile”, she says
approvingly – and taking their dog, a black labrador/border collie cross (“We
think, we don’t really know: she’s from the shelter”) for walks in Hyde
Park.
Listen Up Philip is, in part, about somebody who leaves, about the impact of
emotional unavailability on the people around Jason Schwartzman’s character.
“You get to see what happens in the absence of someone, the impact of them not
being there,” de La Baume says. As for her and Ronson’s own conflicting
schedules, she says, “it just makes it exciting when we do have time at home – I
mean, exciting for us, but so not exciting to talk about. We don’t go out, we
don’t even go to the pub. All we do is watch films and hang out. I’m learning to
cook. Just simple pleasures.” Like I say, so French.
