It has always been easy to trivialize Brigitte Bardot. In 1957, while she was starring in the film that made her a worldwide sensation, “And God Created Woman,” what she was doing was not widely considered accomplished acting — or, in some ways, acting at all. The film treated her as a ripe object of erotic fixation, and that’s exactly what she was called upon to play. She is presented with shots of her bare feet arched, her body lying naked, face down. “Sex kitten.” “Doll.” “Teenage temptress.” Back then she wore all these things. Was the film a sober French drama or softcore porn? It was marketed as something in between.
But the stakes were much greater. And this is partly explained by the fact that Bardot, who died on Sunday at the age of 91, revealed, just like Marilyn Monroe, a sex symbol from a completely different era. Monroe, although a huge star, still had a bowed foot in a fraught past; Bardot was the woman-child of the world to come – the cheeky girl who already embodied and anticipated the spirit of the 60s.
In “And God Created Woman,” she is dashing, sensual, angry, spectacularly uninhibited, and she represents a new type of erotic abandon freed from the old strictures of the femme fatale. Her character, Juliette, 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 ruin the present,” she tells a potential new lover. Yet when she learns, a little later, that his declarations of love are for the birds – that he doesn’t want a future with her, just an adventure – the hurt that smolders on her face becomes the most ripe thing about her. At the climax, doing a abandon dance to the music of a hot Caribbean band, you see her literally escape the control of the men around her.
A word about the Bardot pout. It’s sexy as hell, but it’s a pout of steel. He has solve. That’s why it’s so sexy. There was as much power in that pout as in Barbara Stanwyck’s snarl or Rita Hayworth’s furious glare. Maybe more. Because it’s as if Bardot has absorbed the temptation vibes of all the cinema goddesses who came before her and is standing on their shoulders, seeking 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 fetishes, and when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She shows her body, neither more nor less, and this body rarely settles into a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as a prey. The male is an object for her, just as she is for him.
The title “And God Created Woman” sounds grandiose, but what it means is this: God had now created a new type of woman. A naturally confident and desirable woman, who is the epitome (to quote Jim Morrison) of a 20th century fox, and who will not fall prey to the gazes of the men around her. When Juliette, to avoid being sent back to the orphanage where she comes from, agrees to marry the kind, gentle and idiotic Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a priest warns him: “This girl is like an animal. She must be tamed.” But in reality, it’s not possible to tame what Bardot had: a casual freedom that was present in the way she held her body and in every look she cast.
If she was triumphantly brazen in “And God Created Woman”, in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Le Mépris” (1963), she broke the law of all films ever made about love. In movies, love and romance are the most powerful religions, and when relationships fall apart, it’s for all sorts of reasons. They collapse, break down, go bankrupt. But in “Contempt,” Bardot plays Camille, the wife of a playwright (Michel Piccoli) who has been hired to rewrite the script for a film version of “The Odyssey,” and when the fire goes out in their marriage, it’s not for a tidy dramatic explanation. It’s because… she decided… the fire was out… just because. Because in the newly modern world, where women are no longer under the thumb of men, their feelings might change, and the reasons because it could be… inaccessible to the man who holds the bag of their union now empty.
The way Bardot plays this, pronouncing the word “contempt” (the feeling she now has for her husband) like a stone wall, gives off a tragic and concrete side that lies on the other side of the cruelty. He East cruel, but not because she is cruel. That’s because life is cruel. And its beauty, in cinematic terms, is part cruelty; this is part of what she will remember from now on. Bardot depicted all this, in 1963, with what could be called the consciousness of the new woman. A new awareness of choice and how the old rules that held the world together no longer applied.
When discussing “Contempt,” male critics tend to focus on the cinematic woes of screenwriter Piccoli (a Godard surrogate) and the difficulties of director Fritz Lang (who plays himself). But the heart of the film is the half-hour sequence in which Bardot and Piccoli wander around their apartment in Rome, having the kind of fight that feels less like a movie fight and more like a real fight than almost any movie scene you could name. The sequence suggests that if Godard had not decided to become a cerebral, postmodern, allusive creator of cinematic joker-troll riddles that never quite fit together, he might have been an extraordinary poet of emotional naturalism. And the cold heart of the film, which is arguably Godard’s greatest, is Brigitte Bardot’s performance.
Looking back and watching Bardot’s films now, you see allusions and echoes of so many actresses who came after her, from Maria Schneider to Nancy Allen to Dominique Sanda to Uma Thurman to Adèle Exarchopoulos to Sydney Sweeney. She was marketed as a pin-up, but she was a singular presence who blazed a path of sensual and spiritual fearlessness. And part of that is because she insisted, much like the Madonna of the ’80s and ’90s, that for a certain type of performer (her gender), sexuality was inseparable from artistry. Bardot’s eroticized projection of female identity was itself a transcendent performance. If God created woman, Bardot gave you the impression that she had created herself. Only time will tell if the future will be feminine. But once she had made her mark, the future was definitely Bardot.
