12/29/2025
All hail Bardot.
Less of an actress than a flagrant happening, she foreshadowed the 60’s before flowered. Brigitte had a liberated attitude about freedom yet allowed herself to be used by the predatory, mediocre Roger Vadim. (She would not be the last of his obsessions.)
Vadim’s And God Created Woman made Brigitte into a cultural phenomenon, while Godard’s Contempt cemented her legend, opening with Bardot’s nudity reclining across an enormous CinemaScope screen. Workdwide cages were properly rattled.
Contempt (a Carlo Ponti/joseph Levine production—-Sophia’s husband and a hardcore showman) is the filmmaker’s confession of marriage to an actress. The moving image of Bardot is splendidly sensual, yet the film displays her without affection.
Bardot’s image was hedonistic with a touch of the surly, best early on. She became increasingly mechanical on film, like she’d rather be saving animals.
The sun, the smoking, the lowering of the curtain on Cote d’Azur amour, gave her the freedom to let herself unravel as she protected and preserved so many of God’s creatures. Sadly, letting herself go seems also to have brought some dire politics and misogynistic observations of her own.
A boss of mine recalled seeing her on the Cote. The tumbled golden mop—-a woman falling not out of bed but the cabana—-the little, checked off-the-shoulder blouses that showed tummy, the short-shorts, barefoot, tanned, carrying a few francs tucked in her Gitanes (a cigarette brand that translates to ‘gypsy women’), jumping into a sportscar.
“Pouty, defiant; not really beautiful, but very pretty and exciting. I could see what all the fuss was about. She was utterly fabulous.”
