Can you remember the sweepingly melancholy and even depressive romantic tone of the music that Georges Delerue composed for Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963)? This music accompanies shots of a nude Brigitte Bardot that were insisted on by the producers of that film, and it is meant to underline the disappointment and disillusionment felt by both her character Camille and Camille’s screenwriter husband (Michel Piccoli). Bardot’s Camille lies naked on her stomach and makes a verbal inventory of her own physical splendor, and all we can feel is the way that passion has ebbed away for both her and her husband.
Bardot grew up in a wealthy and repressive family that she rebelled against as a teenager. A brunette beauty, she studied dance and worked as a fashion model before falling in love with the film director Roger Vadim. Her parents objected to their relationship, and this resulted in Bardot attempting suicide, a cry for help or attention that would be repeated several more times in her life. She married Vadim in 1952.
Bardot made an impression at the 1953 Cannes Film Festival, and she began getting small roles in movies. For “Nero’s Mistress” (1956), the director wanted her to have blonde hair, and Bardot was so pleased with the result after dying her tresses blonde that she kept it and emerged as a groundbreaking star that same year in Vadim’s “And God Created Woman,” a film so visually luscious that the saturated colors of the Saint-Tropez locations give off a hedonistic, pleasure-seeking vibe fully in keeping with Bardot’s barefoot prowling around town.
Seen today, “And God Created Woman” is just as gob-smacking a sensory experience as it was when it was first released. There was a period when I had been watching too many visually drab and earnest contemporary dramas and I suddenly came upon “And God Created Woman” on the Criterion Channel; I had seen it before, in a less attractive video copy, but I was so enthralled by the colors and by Bardot’s fierce and animal-like physical magnetism that I kept watching it over and over again.
Bardot wears tight skirts and blouses here with a neckline that exposes her shoulders, and her hair is a bedhead tangle of long blonde tendrils. Her face is doll-like but filled with a queer kind of waiting and empty resentment that explodes in a later scene where she insists on dancing for a group of men and driving them crazy with lust. “I’d like to stop thinking completely!” she cries, wanting to live for pleasure alone, at a peak of that pleasure when she gazes at her own sexy image in a full-length mirror.
To use an old-fashioned term for Bardot’s still revelatory performance in “And God Created Woman,” it was clear that the character she was playing knew no laws but her own desires, and Bardot’s exhibitionistic sexuality was like a fist punching out all restraints on female behavior in this period. Yes, she was showing off for her husband Vadim, a jaded lecher if ever there was one, but she was also doing it for herself, and this was proved when she left Vadim for her beautiful young leading man, Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Bardot created a sensation with “And God Created Woman,” and the after-effects of this would last her for around ten more years. Many of her vehicles were lightweight, but she went in for a heavier role in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s rather punishing “La Vérité” (1960), which involved courtroom scenes where she was expected to cry and carry on. She did this well enough, but it was a far cry from the incendiary auto-eroticism she had offered her audience and herself in “And God Created Woman.”
Bardot sulked her way through Godard’s “Contempt,” her eyes lined with eyeliner, her hair so blonde that it looked radioactive. That movie uses her famous body, but it also relies on her clear dissatisfaction, her own contempt for the world around her, which was only alleviated by bouts of sexual excess or display. She appeared opposite Jeanne Moreau in Louis Malle’s “Viva Maria!” (1965), but it was only in Michel Deville’s overlooked screwball comedy “The Bear and the Doll” (1970) that she belatedly revealed a sense of humor opposite Jean-Pierre Cassel.
She retired from movies in 1973 right before turning 40, and the rest of her long life was spent primarily on animal rights activism. By the late 1990s, when she published a memoir, Bardot began issuing racist statements, mainly anti-Muslim, and she would get taken to court in France again and again for these statements and fined for them. Occasionally, Bardot would try to backtrack or clarify, but always she would wind up in court again, and partly this must have been due to the influence of her last husband, who was an adviser to the far-right French political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. She also made some regrettable statements earlier this year regarding MeToo and feminism that further damaged her reputation.
All of this was so ugly and went on for so long that of course it tarnished Bardot’s legacy. But now that this older racist version of her is gone, what remains for all time is that girl walking around Saint-Tropez barefoot in “And God Created Woman,” insisting on her right to pleasure, insisting on breaking rules that had been set up for her sex. (She died at her home in Saint-Tropez.) That rebellious streak in Bardot grew twisted as she aged, but in her youth it made a mark that can still be felt as liberating.
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