Movie: And God Created Woman - Et Dieu... créa la femme (Roger Vadim, 1956)
The French will give you two teen idols, and two worldviews, for the price of one. Not only is Brigitte Bardot here sexier than Marilyn Monroe, she is also a rebel without a cause. That allows the film to be both tantalizingly provocative in the way it shoots Bardot, and adopt an old-fashioned moralising attitude towards her independent rebelliousness. It shows off her body and non-conformism, while tut-tutting her for showing off her body and non-conformism. Happily it is much more committed to the former than to the latter, making it an enjoyably cheesy film that is also a good example of how cultural movements take their time to fully develop. Some of the elements which would a few years later come to define the French New Wave are already visible here, especially in the final scene.
That final scene is also the best in the film. Bardot's character Juliete Hardy has by then spent most of the film married to Michel Tardieu (Jean-Louis Trintignant, not bad, but you wouldn't think this is one of the great French actors), while being actually in love with his brother Antoine (who also loves her, but sees himself as a responsible adult who can't be with such a debauchee). Meanwhile the third brother also desires her, and so does the businessman investing in the shipyard of the three brothers and their mother (who thinks Juliete is "a slut" who will lead Michel astray, which of course she does). You can see how one could lose one's mind in such a situation, which is what Juliete does in the basement of a notorious bar where a band of immigrants is practicing their music. Juliet starts dancing, seemingly in a trance, with the camera circling around her, occasionally closing in on her anguished face, arms and legs while the basement slowly fills with all the men in her life looking at her in wonder. As this is happening, she keeps dancing and the camera keeps following her until a gun is fired. Nobody dies, but nothing is resolved either and the film ends on an ambiguous note.
It was interesting to see this film so shortly after writing about Atlantic City. Both are films by French directors, set in a seaside town on the cusp of a generational transformation thanks to investments in casinos and hotels. And both are about young women seeking to embrace that transformation, while being held back by people who would like to keep those changes at bay for as long as possible. While this is for the most part a lighthearted comedy and Atlantic City a serious, sometimes bleak, character-driven drama, the latter film ultimately ends on a more hopeful note. Yet, in reality And God Created Woman had a much bigger impact on its city's transformation, helping turn St. Tropez into a touristic hotspot, thereby contributing to the rise of mass tourism (which I would argue is one of the most important developments of the 20th Century, deeply connected to labor rights and wealth distribution). Beyond Brigitte Bardot, some of the most interesting sights in this film are the empty untouched beaches, a nice reminder that these are nothing more then sandy areas along a body of water before being social spaces.
No comments:
Post a Comment