It's always been easy to simplify Brigitte Bardot. In 1957, she starred in the film that made her a worldwide sensation:And God created woman“, what she did was not widely regarded as accomplished screen acting – or, in a sense, acting at all. The film treated her as a ripe object of erotic fixation, and that is exactly what she was intended to play. She is presented with shots of her bare legs arched as her body lies naked, face down on the ground. “Sexy kitten.” “Doll.” “Young Seductress.” At the time it was labeled as all these things. Was this film a sober French drama or soft porn? It was marketed as something in between.
However, there was more at stake. And part of this is due to the fact that Bardo, who died on Sunday at 91turned no less a figure than Marilyn Monroe into a sex symbol of a completely different era. Monroe, although a huge star, still stood with one foot in the strict past; Bardot was a woman-child of the future world – a daring girl who already embodied and anticipated the spirit of the swinging 60s.
In And God Created Woman she is frisky, sultry, angry, amazingly uninhibited, and symbolizes a new kind of erotic abandon, freed from the old constraints of the femme fatale. Her heroine, Juliet, is not a gold digger; she rejects the advances of rich men who come to her. She just does what she wants. “All the future does is spoil the present,” she tells a potential new lover. However, when a little later she finds out that his declarations of love are addressed to the birds, that he does not want a future with her, but just an affair, the wounded smoldering fire on her face becomes the ripest thing in her. At the climax, while performing a dance of self-forgetfulness to the music of a hot Caribbean band, you see her literally spiraling out of control of the men around her.
A few words about Bardot's pout. It's sexy as hell, but it's a steely pout. He has decide. That's why it's so sexy. Those pouting lips had as much power as Barbara Stanwyck's growl or Rita Hayworth's come-hither look. Maybe more. Because Bardo seemed to have absorbed the temptations of all the screen goddesses who came before her, and stood on their shoulders, striving for something more… real.
Two years after the release of And God Created Woman, which became the highest-grossing foreign language film of all time in the United States, the great French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote of Bardot: “Her clothes are not fetish, and when she undresses she reveals no secret. She shows her body, no more, no less, and that body rarely becomes still. She walks, she dances, she moves. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. In the game of love she is so She is as much a hunter as she is a prey. A man is as much an object for her as she is for him.”
The title “And God Created Woman” sounds grandiose, but what it means is this: God has now created a new kind of woman. A woman who is effortlessly confident and desirable, who is the quintessential (to quote Jim Morrison) 20th century fox and who will not fall prey to the gaze of the men who surround her. When Juliette, to avoid being sent back to the orphanage from which she comes, agrees to marry the sweet, sweet and goofy Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the priest warns him: “This girl is like an animal. She needs to be tamed.” But in fact, what Bardot had was impossible to tame: the effortless freedom that was in the way she held her body and in every glance she cast.
If only she had been triumphantly brazen in And God Created Woman, in Jean-Luc GodardContempt“(1963) she broke the law of every movie ever made about love. In movies, love and romance are the most powerful of religions, and when relationships fall apart, it does so for a variety of reasons. They fall apart, they crack, they go broke. But in Contempt, Bardot plays Camille, the wife of a playwright (Michelle Piccoli), who is hired to rewrite the script for the film version of The Odyssey, and when the fire goes out in their marriage, it's not for some neat dramatic explanation. It's because… she decided… that the fire had gone out… simply because in the new modern world where women are no longer under the control of men, their feelings may change, and… reasons because it may be… inaccessible to the person who holds the bag of their now empty union.
The way Bardot plays it, pronouncing the word “contempt” (the feeling she now feels for her husband) like a stone wall, she exudes a tragic matter-of-factness that is on the other side of cruelty. This is cruel, but not because she is cruel. The fact is that life is cruel. And her beauty, from a cinematic point of view, is part of the cruelty; this is part of what she will now hide. Bardot portrayed all this in 1963 with what might be called the consciousness of a new woman. A new awareness of choice and that the old rules that hold the world together no longer apply.
When discussing Contempt, male critics tend to fixate on the film industry woes of screenwriter Piccoli (Godard's surrogate) and world-weary director Fritz Lang (playing himself). But the heart of the film is a half-hour sequence in which Bardot and Piccoli wander around their apartment in Rome, getting into a fight that looks less like a movie fight and more like a real fight than almost any movie scene you could name. This episode suggests that if Godard had not decided to go the way of the allusive postmodern wiseguy, a creator of cinematic prankster-troll puzzles that never quite fit together, he might have become a preeminent poet of emotional naturalism. And the cold-beating heart of what is arguably Godard's greatest film is Brigitte Bardot's performance.
Looking back and watching Bardot's films now, you see hints and echoes of many of the actresses who would come after her, from Maria Schneider to Nancy Allen, Dominique Sanda, Uma Thurman, Adele Exarchopoulos and Sydney Sweeney. She was marketed as a charming girl, but she was a unique individual who paved the way for sensual and spiritual fearlessness. Part of this is because she, like the Madonnas of the '80s and '90s, insisted that for a certain type of performer (her type), sexuality was inseparable from artistry. Bardot's eroticized projection of female identity was itself a transcendent performance. If God created woman, Bardo made you feel like she created herself. Only time will tell if women are the future. But once she made her mark, Bardot was definitely the future.
