Somehow, Walk Hard did not kill the musical biopic. The Oscar-baiting, soundtrack-selling subgenre just keeps going. Of course, fans will always rally for their fallen idols to be brought back to fake life on celluloid. Particularly, I keep hearing digital cries for James Franco to resurrect Jeff Buckley. That imaginary project certainly has potential, but there is one that intrigues me more that is actually getting made. Perhaps encouraged by the success of La Vie En Rose and its breakout performance by Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf, Universal is gambling on a French language production about another frog icon/cult stateside figure. Serge Gainsbourg (Vie Heroique) will tell the lurid, elegant, sleazy, glamorous story of France’s finest and most adventurous pop star. Gainsbourg was a master of many instruments and styles (I’m partial to his reggae excursions with Sly and Robbie, and awestruck that he had the balls to piss off Bob Marley by getting Rita to sing dirty lyrics), but perhaps the instrument he was most accomplished with was his raging libido. Like Prince with better taste, he either married, dated, had intercourse with, or “wrote and arranged songs for” maybe 30% of the attractive women in the performing arts throughout Europe from the ’60s through the ’80s, most of whom were well over a decade younger than him. In addition to a legacy of great music and legitimized sleaze, his genitals also gave the world his fetching daughter Charlotte, recently seen speaking English and looking pretty in The Science of Sleep and I’m Not There. It is an indication of what French royalty the Gainsbourg progeny is that when she decided to take her own stab at pop stardom (with the smooth 2006 album 5:55) she managed to get Jarvis Cocker to write lyrics for her and scored production by Air. She also did a duet with daddy Serge called “Lemon Incest” when she was 12. For fans of pedophilia or nifty music, a good introduction to Serge’s work is Histoire de Melody Nelson. This is an influential concept album with themes not entirely unlike Nabakov’s Lolita composed with Jean-Claude Vannier. Perhaps it makes perfect sense how the French adore him. I kind of do, too.