I love Charlotte Gainsbourg. Partly it’s because of her movies — but mostly it’s her underbite.
Gainsbourg discusses her acting and singing careers in an interview with AnOther magazine, and she’s impressive in both spheres. I especially liked her in My Wife Is An Actress and Love, Etc. — maybe slightly less so in The Science of Sleep, but only because her character was written as too much of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She tends to project a mysterious quality and a sense that even her characters don’t fully understand their own motivations — a sense borne out, perhaps, by her statement that, “What I do and the decisions I make – whether to make music or be in a film – are very instinctive and I only understand much later, in retrospect, my reasons for doing things.” But: the underbite.
Every kid has her own insecurities, but many of mine started at the orthodontist. Told I had catastrophic bite problems that would pretty much destroy all my teeth by adulthood, I had to wear a medieval-looking palate expander that spread my front top teeth apart in jack-o-lantern fashion. Then while braces worked to close the gaps up, I was given a “bumper” for my lower jaw which pushed my lip out Neanderthal-style. Eventually all this hardware did its work and I emerged with medically acceptable teeth, but also with something of an obsession with my jaw. I was sure my profile looked weird. My upper lip was small, my lower lip was big. My chin was sort of jutting. The obsession faded as I entered college, but I was still pretty convinced people shouldn’t see me from the side — until I saw Charlotte Gainsbourg.
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