Bardot … there was a time when it couldn’t be pronounced without a knowing pout on the second syllable. French headline-writers loved calling the world’s most desirable film star by her initials: “BB”, that is: bébé, a bit of weirdly infantilised tabloid pillow-talk. When Brigitte Bardot retired from the movies in the mid-70s, taking up the cause of animal rights and a ban on the import of baby seals, the French press took to calling her BB-phoque, a homophone of the French for “baby seal” with a nasty hint of an Anglo pun. But France’s love affair with Bardot was to curdle, despite her fierce patriotism and admiration for Charles de Gaulle (the feeling was reciprocated). As her animal rights campaigning morphed in the 21st century into an attack on halal meat, and then into shrill attacks on the alleged “Islamicisation” of France, her relations with the modern world curdled even more.
In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.
She drove a hungry media industry as a supposed man-eater, whose lovers and ex-husbands obligingly brawled over her in the Paris streets in front of press photographers. But Bardot was driven half- or three-quarters mad with the relentless intrusion. She was a public figure whose image was consumed not only through movies but magazine covers, paparazzi shots and gloating press stories. Perhaps only Jennifer Aniston, in our own time, has endured something similar.
After a number of gamine roles in which her hair was mousy brown, Bardot made her spectacular breakthrough in 1956, at age 22, in a now very genteel-looking Technicolor romantic comedy knowingly titled And God Created Woman. She played a devastatingly desirable blonde, doing the wasp-waisted, derriere-wiggling walk that was the last word in 50s sexiness. Her character attracted the self-destructive obsession of an older man – which became a bit of a trope in Bardot movies – and was desired by younger types, including, in an early role, the sobersided young Jean-Louis Trintignant, who was destined to be Bardot’s lover in real life. It was directed by Bardot’s Svengali-like then husband Roger Vadim, who controlled her personal and professional life.
Bardot did work with serious film-makers. Louis Malle directed her in Vie Privée, or Private Life (1961), in which she plays a version of herself, the epicentre of hysterical celebrity and voyeuristic disapproval, with blond Bardot-clones everywhere on the Paris streets, and her character heading for an awful, Princess Diana-type nemesis at the hands of the media. But it was Bardot’s unhappy fate to be patronised by the biggest name of all: Jean-Luc Godard. In Le Mépris, or Contempt (1963), she plays Camille, the beautiful wife of Michel Piccoli’s troubled screenwriter. Bardot’s nakedness is displayed as the very epitome of cinema’s tacky commercialism, but there is something cynical and misogynist in Godard’s approach.
A wittier and more playful response to Bardot’s colossal celebrity came from Agnès Varda in her 1965 film Le Bonheur, or Happiness. A carpenter and his wife are thinking of going to see a film starring Bardot and Jeanne Moreau (presumably Louis Malle’s Viva Maria!, for which Bardot got a Bafta nomination). His wife asks him whom he prefers: Bardot or Moreau? Gallantly, he replies that he prefers her to either of the two film stars. Then Varda does a hard cut to his workplace locker – covered in Bardot pictures. Of course he prefers Bardot! Who didn’t?
As the 60s continued, Bardot did an awful lot of ropey films, although fans have a soft spot for Shalako (1968), a somewhat bizarre western she did with Sean Connery, whose hairpiece she reportedly found disconcerting. But then she made her move into political activism, one of the most intensely French moments in the country’s postwar history. While skiing in Meribel in 1965, Bardot was mortified when Charly, a German shepherd belonging to Alain Delon that she was looking after, bit a fellow skier on the leg: the victim was none other than French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was entranced by Bardot’s extravagant apologies and the way she slathered ointment on his leg – she turned him into an unlikely political ally. Bardot was, however, teased for her animal campaigns, even before she went full-time with them. Her home in Bazoches, near Paris (now the home of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation), was a place where animals were allowed to wander indoors: six goats, a dozen cats, a rabbit, 20 ducks, a donkey and some sheep. The aroma was distinct.
Bardot made some great films. La Vérité, or The Truth (1960), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, is a rip-roaring courtroom drama with Bardot’s character in the dock on a charge of murder. If her defence lawyer can prove it wasn’t premeditated, then she can get off on the French crime passionnel clause. Flashbacks show her desolate life as a runaway, obsessed with men who had been obsessed with her, semi-homeless, drifting into prostitution. Her character scandalises the court by having read Simone De Beauvoir’s racy novel The Mandarins. (De Beauvoir was a Bardot fan.) It is gripping stuff, with a barnstormingly defiant final speech from Bardot, denouncing the hypocrisy and cruelty of the censorious older generation.
But my favourite is En Cas de Malheur, or In Case of Emergency (1958), a terrific crime melodrama adapted from a Georges Simenon thriller and directed by Claude Autant-Lara. Bardot plays a woman accused of violent robbery who seduces her middle-aged lawyer into fabricating evidence that will acquit her. The lawyer is played by Jean Gabin, and there is a real, crackling chemistry between these two icons of French cinema, old and new. Their scenes together have a real tenderness and wonderful poignancy, especially when Bardot’s character believes herself to be in love with her kindly but cynical older man – a great role for Gabin. “On est heureuse!” she declaims to the heavens: We are happy! Watching Bardot in this film is enough to make you happy.
