Sunday, Jul 6, 2008
At the heart of Roger Vadim's films was a guiltless celebration of the pleasures of sex, love, food, sea and sun.
Mar 6, 2000 | Roger Vadim, who died in Paris on Feb. 11 at 72, was the classiest exploitation filmmaker who ever lived. That's not intended to belittle the director, as some of the American obituaries that have appeared seem bent on doing. (If you read Alan Riding's obit in the New York Times you might wonder what's worse: death or having your life summed up by this guy.) Probably no screen purveyor of gratuitous female flesh has ever been so blithe, so beguiled by the leading ladies who paraded nude through his movies. The fact that those women were frequently his wives (Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Jane Fonda) or mistresses (Catherine Deneuve) might help to explain Vadim's unique brand of exhibitionist tenderness, but I think there's another reason: Vadim adored women.
His first film was called "And God Created Woman" (1956), and Vadim photographed his stars like a man who never stopped giving thanks to the Creator. The director George Stevens once said that CinemaScope was good only for shooting snakes and funerals. Vadim proved him wrong with the glorious shot near the beginning of "And God Created Woman" in which a sunbathing Bardot stretches out across the wide screen. It may be the most famous shot in all his movies (helping to get it condemned by the Vatican -- always a good sign) and the most emblematic. It's frankly voyeuristic (as is a later shot where Bardot rises nude from her conjugal bed, shielded by the transparent sail of a model boat) but without a trace of smirking or leering. There was no grossness or vulgarity in Vadim. He may have been a voluptuary, but he was a discreet one. He may have been a Svengali, but he gazes at his leading ladies more like Casanova than Don Juan.
Vadim wasn't a great filmmaker. His plots are often trivial, and when he took a turn toward the fantastic, as in "Barbarella" (1968) and "Don Juan, or if Don Juan Were a Woman" (1973), the results were often ludicrous. Even in his heyday Vadim received very little critical respect. He wasn't reworking the form of movies as were his contemporaries, Truffaut, Godard and Rivette, and so, in contrast, he seemed easily dismissed. It may be that American critics, working under our native assumption that "European" equals "art" (and, to be fair, working in an extraordinarily fertile period for foreign movies), didn't know what to do with a foreign director who was unabashedly commercial. And then there's the traditional critical blind spot: the inability to make a case for what gives us pleasure if it can't be defended as art.
Or the inability to see the virtues of a filmmaker who is casual about his craft, who isn't preoccupied with filmmaking. Vadim's movies are relaxed, not obsessed. Their sexiness is like being immersed in a warm bath. There are no great revelations here, no philosophy that goes deeper than partaking of the sensual pleasures life offers. You get the feeling that if Vadim had been told he could never have made another movie, it would have been fine by him, that there were plenty of other things for him to enjoy. But that capacity for pleasure is at the heart of the pleasure his movies give.
Vadim's movies reveal the eye of a natural filmmaker. His cinematographers vary from movie to movie and so the consistent clarity of his compositions makes it pretty clear that their pictorial instinct was Vadim's. The vistas of the Mediterranean in "And God ... " and the Spanish mountains in 1958's "The Night Heaven Fell" (both of them recently released in restored, wide-screen videos by Home Visions Cinema) are postcard-pretty but also attuned to the distinctive quality of light and air, to each climate's particular brand of heat. Bardot scandalizes the locals in the former by sunbathing nude. But the "amorality" that the Vatican saw in Bardot's wild child-woman (with exquisite irony, the same thing the blue noses in the movie condemn) seems like a natural response to the setting. A hedonist of superb taste, Vadim was drawn to locales of both natural beauty and indolent sensuality. (It's no accident that his 1984 American remake of "And God Created Woman," starring Rebecca DeMornay, is set in Santa Fe.)
The most vivid setting of the Vadims I've managed to see (many, like "Circle of Love" or "The Game Is Over," both with Fonda, have been unavailable here for years) is in "Blood and Roses," his 1960 film of the Sheridan Le Fanu vampire tale "Carmilla." Part of the movie was shot on the grounds of the Emperor Hadrian's villa, and Vadim and cinematographer Claude Renoir (the nephew of Jean Renoir) surround it with misted wintry light. Even in the disgraceful video available from Paramount (a pan-and-scan job taken from a terribly faded print) the eerie delicacy of the movie's look comes through. The dialogue is often stiff and the acting (by Mel Ferrer, Elsa Martinelli and Vadim's then-wife Stroyberg as the vampire Carmilla) worse. But that stiffness gradually takes on the feel of somnambulance and the movie achieves some of the fragmented lyricism of the great silent horror films. Mood is everything here, and it pays off in a dream sequence that's a startling piece of Gothic modernism, like what Cocteau might have come up with if he'd surrendered to the high-fashion erotic perversity of Helmut Newton.
Get Salon in your mailbox!