Sex, of course, is what sold Vadim's movies, though most of them are exceedingly decorous. Vadim was naughty, not shocking. If, for critics, "foreign" equals "art," Vadim's movies recall the days when, for couples looking for an acceptably titillating evening out, "foreign" equaled "sexy." Which may be why his 1973 "Don Juan," starring Bardot (in her last role) as a female version of the seducer as destroyer, feels so lost. Coming out in the era of porno chic, when it was OK to discuss "Deep Throat" at suburban dinner parties (as in a memorable scene from Philip Roth's novel "American Pastoral"), the movie is Vadim's attempt to live up to the new era. But his heart isn't in it, and the movie, complete with a pot-party orgy that's as silly as most movie orgies, is gaudy, false to his decorous taste. The scene where Bardot takes Jane Birkin to bed was much touted at the time, but the two do little more than cuddle (and Vadim rather primly focuses on their feet). Even his most famous film, "Barbarella," is best summed up as racy.

"Barbarella" sounds like such a good time -- a sci-fi sex comedy scripted by (among others) Terry Southern and starring Fonda in a role Vadim described as "a sexual 'Alice in Wonderland'" -- that discovering how bad it is remains one of my biggest movie letdowns. The cheap visuals make it appear to be taking place in a sound-stage vacuum, and the execution is not only flat-footed but at times (when evil mutant children set dolls with razor-sharp teeth upon Barbarella) inappropriately unpleasant. The movie, though, is a validation of the faith Vadim put in his leading ladies. Fonda's delicious performance periodically guides Vadim to amusing comic-book carnality. When Fonda proved herself a great dramatic actress a few years later with her roles in "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" and "Klute," "Barbarella" was held against her, proof of the frivolity she'd left behind. Fonda's performance, though, is one of the sexiest comic performances in the movies. She's the square-jawed American hero transformed into an all-American sexpot, Buck Rogers with an itch in her knickers.

But the original "And God Created Woman" is the movie that still best sums up Vadim. The plot is pure melodrama -- Bardot inveigles an inexperienced innocent (Jean-Louis Trintignant) into marriage to escape being sent back to reformatory, though she still resents being jilted by his stud older brother. But unlike most movie melodramas, this one didn't omit the sex. The familiarity must have been reassuring to audiences, a turn-on that didn't threaten them. Frangois Truffaut summed it up (with the enthusiastic overstatement that made his criticism so lively) when he said the film was "simultaneously amoral (rejecting the current moral system but proposing no other) and puritanical (conscious of its amorality and disturbed by it)." It is, of all things, a movie about a young couple who learn to love each other through the joys of marriage. (The same is true of the DeMornay remake, a bad, but sweet mixture of soap and soft-core sex. And it appears to have been true of Vadim's life. He was reportedly a good papa who loved to cook for his four kids, and at the time of his death he had been happily married to his fifth wife, actress Marie-Christine Barrault, for 15 years.)

It's undeniably conventional -- Bardot learns to respect her husband when he becomes man enough to take charge -- and it's a bummer that Trintignant expresses his anger over Bardot's dalliance with his brother by slapping her. But the movie is rooted enough in recognizable sexual archetypes to not be a total concoction. It's not so farfetched to think that a timid husband would find self-confidence by discovering he's capable of giving his wife sexual pleasure, or that a spouse's jealousy would be a turn-on to a cheating partner.

Most of all, "And God Created Woman" is a happy case of a born movie star being brought to the screen by a born filmmaker. Bardot and Vadim had begun an affair when he was 21 and she was 15, and he'd begun to mold her into a starlet who caught the attention of the press. What she does in the movie isn't acting (that would have to wait until her heartbreaking performance in Godard's 1963 "Contempt"), but it's transfixing. Bardot is a walking overabundance of everything -- hair, curves, lips. So much has been written about Bardot the sex kitten that it's worth saying that her appeal in the movie has something of the appeal James Dean had in "Rebel Without a Cause," though without Dean's neurotic neediness. Bardot has a thoughtless insolence that gets you immediately on her side. When she comes down to the wedding banquet wrapped in a sheet and appropriates for her husband the lunch her new mother-in-law has laid out (he's waiting in bed upstairs), or when she refuses to defer to the snooty customers she encounters at her boring job, she's the triumph of instinct over duty, of youth over everything fusty and stale. The clichi invoked over and over to describe Bardot in the film was a wild animal, and there's an element of truth there. Seeing her walk away after sloughing off the chastisement of some authority figure is like watching your cat walk out of the room after you've scolded it: They both move with the deliberate provocation of a creature who couldn't care less.

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