For some reason, I've never been able to like Brigitte Bardot or to look at her as someone other than a racist old and bitter woman who loves animals more than she loves certain types of people. I think that it is due to the fact that I didn't live during the times when she was the sexiest woman in the world and that I hate with an Heathcliff-like passion her most celebrated movie And God created Woman. However, I'm tempted to give Bardot a second look after reading this from Agnès Poirier, whom I have no trouble liking:
In 1958, Raymond Cartier, then editor of Paris-Match, dedicated eight pages to an investigation of "le cas Bardot".
He summoned psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists to try to
unpick the roots of the Bardot phenomenon, and to ask what lessons
could be drawn about "the modern crowd's psychology and the evolution
of today's mores" that could be used in helping to turn back the tide.
He
scrutinised in particular the events in Philadelphia, Cleveland,
Providence and Memphis, where cinema managers were arrested for showing
And God Created Woman and judges in wigs and robes showed up in
delegation to express their outrage at its licentious nature. Would
Bardot be banned from American screens? Paris-Match psychoanalysts
proceeded to delve into her comfortable childhood and upbringing in the
smart 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel tower. She lived in
a seven-room apartment with an older sister, a nanny and parents whom
she spoke formally to, using the term "vous" rather than "tu".
The family cat Crocus, "having become as bourgeois as its owners,
didn't even think of devouring" the birds that lived in a little white
cage.
Eight pages later, Cartier concluded: "Bardot is immoral,
from head to toe." Agreeing with the American censors of the east
coast, he declared: ban Bardot.
Faced with the bourgeois
backlash, French intellectuals suddenly understood that there was much
more at stake than just the lovely curves of a young star. In a 1959
essay about Bardot called The Lolita Syndrome, Simone de Beauvoir
foresaw Bardot's entire life with its upheavals and triumphs. She
called Bardot the "locomotive of women's history", and compared her
irruption into French society with existentialism, presenting Bardot as
the first and most liberated woman of postwar France.
De Beauvoir
wrote: "When Marlene Dietrich exhibited her silk-wrapped thighs while
singing in her husky voice, she was casting a spell . . . Brigitte
Bardot doesn't cast spells; she acts. Her flesh doesn't have the
generosity that symbolises passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and
when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She simply shows off her
body, which is in constant movement. She walks, she dances, she moves.
In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object
for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what
hurts males' pride." It was clear to all that Bardot, like Albert
Camus's stranger, experienced the world through her senses.
Nowadays,
feminists both in Britain and the US would shriek in horror at the
thought that Bardot might be heralded as the emblem of the liberated
woman. But that is just how designer Nicole Farhi remembers her:
"Bardot was totally liberated; it was extraordinary to see, especially
at a time when no women were allowed to be, and it was all the more
unusual that she came from a bourgeois family. It was fantastic to see
that she could just throw conventions away. She lived the way she
pleased, she dressed the way she wanted; in that sense her freedom was
very provocative."