It has always been easy to trivialize Brigitte Bardot. In 1957, starring in the movie that made her a global sensation, “And God Created Woman,” what she did was not widely regarded as accomplished screen acting — or, in a certain way, as acting at all. The movie treated her as a ripe object of erotic fixation, and that’s just what she was called upon to play. She is introduced with shots of her bare feet arched just so, her body lying naked, face down on the ground. “Sex kitten.” “Baby doll.” “Teenage temptress.” At the time, she was branded all those things. Was the movie a sober French drama or soft-core porn? It was marketed as something in between.
Yet there was more at stake. And part of it is that Bardot, who died Sunday at 91, made no less a figure than Marilyn Monroe seem a sex symbol from an entirely different era. Monroe, while a huge star, still had one arched foot in the straitlaced past; Bardot was the woman-child of the world to come — the brazen girl who already embodied and anticipated the spirit of the swinging ’60s.
In “And God Created Woman,” she’s frisky, she’s sultry, she’s angry, she’s spectacularly uninhibited, and she signifies a new kind of erotic abandon that is liberated from the old strictures of the femme fatale. Her character, Juliette, is not a gold-digger; she rejects the advances of the rich men who come on to her. She simply does what she wants to do. “All the future does is spoil the present,” she tells a potential new lover. Yet when she learns, a bit later, that his proclamations of love are for the birds — that he doesn’t want a future with her, just a fling — the wounded smolder on her face becomes the ripest thing about her. At the climax, doing a dance of abandonment to the music of a hot Caribbean band, you see her literally spinning out of 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. It has resolve. Which is why it’s so sexy. There was as much power in that pout as there was in Barbara Stanwyck’s snarl or Rita Hayworth’s come-hither glare. Maybe more. Because it’s as if Bardot had absorbed the temptation vibrations of all the screen goddesses who had come before her and was standing on their shoulders, reaching for something more…real.
Two years after “And God Created Woman” came out, becoming the top-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 strips she is not unveiling a mystery. She is showing her body, neither more nor less, and that body rarely settles into a state of immobility. She walks, she dances, she moves about. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him.”
The title “And God Created Woman” sounds grandiose, but what it meant is: God had now created a new kind of woman. A woman who’s effortlessly confident and coveted, who’s the quintessence (to quote Jim Morrison) of a 20th century fox, and one who will not be the victim of the gazes of the men who surround her. When Juliette, to avoid being sent back to the orphanage she came from, agrees to marry the nice, sweet, dorky Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a priest warns him, “That girl is like animal. She needs to be tamed.” But actually, there’s no taming what Bardot had: a casual freedom that was there in the way she held her body, and in every glance she gave.
If she was triumphantly brazen in “And God Created Woman,” in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963) she broke the law of every film ever made about love. In movies, love and romance are the most powerful of religions, and when relationships fall apart it’s for all kinds of reasons. They break down, crack up, go bust. But in “Contempt,” Bardot plays Camille, the wife of a playwright (Michel Piccoli) who’s hired to rewrite the script for a film version of “The Odyssey,” and when the fire goes out of their marriage, it’s not for some tidy dramatic explanation. It’s because…she has decided…that the fire is gone…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 for that might be…inaccessible to the man left holding the bag of their now-empty union.
The way Bardot plays this, uttering the word “contempt” (the feeling she now has for her husband) as a wall made of stone, she exudes a tragic matter-of-factness that resides on the other side of cruelty. It is cruel, but not because she’s cruel. It’s that life is cruel. And her beauty, in cinematic terms, is part of the cruelty; it’s part of what she will now withhold. Bardot portrayed all of this, in 1963, with what could be called the consciousness of the new woman. A new awareness of choice, and of how the old rules holding the world together no longer applied.
Discussing “Contempt,” male critics tend to get fixated on the film-industry woes of Piccoli’s screenwriter (a Godard surrogate), and the world-weary travails of the director Fritz Lang (playing himself). But the heart of the movie is the half-hour-long sequence in which Bardot and Piccoli wander around their apartment in Rome, having the kind of fight that sounds less like a movie fight and more like a real fight than almost any scene in movies you could name. The sequence suggests that if Godard hadn’t decided to go the route of being an allusive postmodern brainiac creator of prankster-troll cinematic puzzles-that-never-quite-fit-together, he could have been an extraordinary poet of emotional naturalism. And the coldly beating heart of the film, which is arguably Godard’s greatest, is Brigitte Bardot’s performance.
Looking back and watching Bardot’s movies now, you see hints and echoes of so many of the actresses who would come 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, yet she was a singular presence who forged a path of sensual and spiritual fearlessness. And part of it is that she insisted, just as the Madonna of the ’80s and ’90s did, that for a certain kind of performer (her kind), sexuality was inseparable from artistry. Bardot’s eroticized projection of female identity was itself a transcendent performance. If God created woman, Bardot made you feel like she had created herself. Only time will tell if the future is female. But once she’d made her mark, the future was most definitely Bardot.
