His interest in filmmaking was revived in the early '80s. In 1983, he traveled to Africa to direct the rarely seen film Equateur, based on a story by French noir maestro Georges Simenon. The production was plagued by problems and an ill Gainsbourg returned to France.
In 1986, taking advantage of a new scandal he had caused by dueting with his young daughter Charlotte on a track called "Lemon Incest," he cast her as the lead in Charlotte Forever, a strangely autobiographical fiction.
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He spent the last productive years of his life laboring on another weird personal project, a film called Stan the Flasher, about a middle-aged schoolteacher who's having problems at home and becomes obsessed with exposing himself to one of his students. The film — with a script referencing Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Daniel Defoe — premiered in 1990 to befuddled reactions; it's also rarely screened.
When he died, in 1991, alone in his bohemian "personal museum," cared for by a personal valet, Gainsbourg had been working on an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe, in which Friday would be a kindly old black man who has to teach a deranged Crusoe (played by Christopher Lambert, of Highlander fame) about manners and sophistication.
It would have been a fitting cap to Gainsbourg's filmography, a career with too many strange footnotes for simple summarization. The strangest? According to his IMDB entry, Gainsbourg is featured in Jerry Lewis' infamous 1972 Holocaust dramedy, The Day the Clown Cried — a credit that can't be corroborated, as the film remains unfinished and unseen.
