Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
Brigitte Bardot turns 70 Tuesday, and hasn't made a film in 30 years. Yet she remains one of the great movie stars of all time.
Sep 28, 2004 | It's the hair that always gets me. Yes, her body was fabulous, but the magic took place from the shoulders up. Those sparkling almond eyes; the laugh ("a soft brusque laugh that broke into shining crystals" -- Rimbaud); the full lips always slightly parted in anticipation, revealing a fetching gap between the two prominent front teeth; and above all, that messy blond mane. The sight of Brigitte Bardot's hair, as luxuriant and inviting as a love-tousled bed, will always go right to my blood stream. Ever since I first saw her in a movie, I have loved Brigitte Bardot without reason or cessation. She is my ultimate.
Bardot turns 70 on Sept. 28. Thirty years ago, on her 40th birthday, Bardot, who retired from movies in 1973 mainly to devote herself to animal rights (she never cared much about being a movie star), said, "The myth of B.B. is finished. Perhaps in five years people will have forgotten me, maybe not."
As a movie star, she has been just about forgotten in America. In France, Bardot is far from forgotten, though it's unlikely that her 70th will bring her many happy returns from the public. This past June, for the fourth time since 1988, a French court fined Bardot for inciting racial hatred. The cause this time was her book "Un cri dans le silence," which attacks "the Islamization of France." (Her 1998 autobiography, "Initiales B.B.: Mémoires, also resulted in fines.) Vocally supportive of Jean-Marie Le Pen's fascist National Front and married to a member of the party, Bardot also, in "Un cri dans le silence," apparently condemns homosexuals ("fairground freaks"), interracial marriage, unemployment benefits and women in government.
Do I find this an ugly legacy? Yes. Does it affect my pleasure watching her? No. Anyone old enough to remember when some people wouldn't go see Jane Fonda movies and others wouldn't go see John Wayne movies (though, to be fair, neither was espousing fascism) knows how easy it is to ignore people's work because of the vociferousness or silliness of their political statements.
The Bardot I want to celebrate here is the one onscreen. I first encountered Bardot playing herself (a cameo) in a 1965 horror called "Dear Brigitte" about a little-boy math prodigy (Billy Mumy from "Lost in Space") who writes a love letter to her every night. At Bardot's invitation, he travels to France with dad James Stewart to meet her. Bardot is saddled with dumb jokes about not being able to speak English and Mumy sits silently gazing at her like a lovesick leprechaun.
I was about Mumy's age when I saw the movie, but my reaction hasn't changed over the years. Even when I run across the picture on TV today, I want to shake the little twerp. He's blowing a chance to meet Brigitte Bardot! And yet I suspect part of what makes me mad is the suspicion that it would be easy to be reduced to adoring idiocy in front of Bardot. There are stars who have affected me more. There are better actors. There are those whose personas are deeper, more mutable, more mysterious. But there is none who inspires in me such a distinctive mixture of desire and delight.
Watching Bardot you feel none of the embarrassment you sometimes do watching sex symbols wriggle and wiggle. When she exaggerates her sexuality, it's in pursuit of laughs, not seduction -- and the joke is usually that she doesn't realize she has sex appeal to exaggerate. Performing a music-hall number with Jeanne Moreau in "Viva Maria!" Bardot, suffocating in the constricting confines of her merry widow, impatiently tugs the boa collar over her shoulder to give herself some breathing room. When the men in the audience let out a collective "oooohh" in anticipation of even more disrobing, she stops and smiles at them, suddenly realizing she's done something they find sexy and only then affecting sensuality, touching her chin to her shoulder in a teasing moue. She's like a kid who does something that adults find adorable and hams it up to get even more kitchy-kitchy-koos.
Untutored performers can get away with things that trained actors can't, probably because they lack the guile to calculate how to go about getting an effect. Bardot was especially adept at a certain type of comic innocence. In movie after movie she gets laughs out of the expression of wide-eyed shock she employs when she finds something startling. There's a disconnect between the way she looks and the naiveté she displays, as there is between the two sides of her nature, sweet and demure one moment and capable of public displays of childish impatience the next.
In the 1961 "Please Not Now!" (the best of her comedies) she thinks nothing of barging into a men's room to have a fight with her philandering fiancé, and nothing of pushing the old man desperate to use the facilities out the door whenever he intrudes. In his 1986 memoir "Bardot, Deneuve, Fonda," Roger Vadim, Bardot's first husband and the man who made her an international star when he directed her in the 1956 film "...And God Created Woman," wrote that Bardot didn't understand her genius because she embodied both the proper bourgeois values of her upbringing and an unconscious sense of rebellion that challenged those values.
Judging from his account of their courtship, those clashing impulses made her young life hell. Vadim met Bardot when she was 15 and he was 21. Despite being chaperoned so thoroughly that her parents forbade her to see Vadim for two weeks after he kissed her on the subway (her sister was the stoolie), the two managed to secretly become lovers.
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