Who is the Rake: Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot, who died in December, seemed to live several lives in one. She left a complicated legacy, but the Bardot of legend — the seductress who redefined sexuality in the aquamarine midcentury — will never be erased.
The sexiest scene in movie history is not Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie’s tussle between Venetian bed sheets in the 1973 psychological thriller Don’t Look Now. Neither is it Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman’s sapphic tryst in 2010’s Black Swan. It’s not the nihilistic orgy in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, the bookshelf knee-trembler between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in Atonement, or any of the classification-board-ruffling cross-cuts in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También.
No, the sexiest scene committed to celluloid involved no nudity, saw no physical contact between the actors, and was soundtracked not by some tenor-sax bra-remover in C minor but by a Carioca-light cacophony of pounding bongos. I’m referring, of course, to the famous dance scene in Et Dieu... Créa La Femme (‘And God Created Woman’), in which Brigitte Bardot plays a young orphan indulging in an unbridled bonk-fest in 1950s Saint-Tropez. In the scene in question, Bardot — barefoot, unkempt, skirt flailing, insouciance and sensuality leaping from her pores right through the camera lens — flails, flounders and table-dances for an ensemble of libido-stupefied men in a sequence that will have even the most querulous Darwinist nodding in agreement with the movie’s title.
Only Bardot could have done the scene. Without her — without the extraordinary sequence of chemical base pairs residing in her 30 trillion cells — the movie wouldn’t have worked. For Bardot’s radiant sexual charisma belonged to her alone. The slight physical imperfections — the gap between her front teeth and a profile that, mid-pout, could come across as a sneer of incredulous contempt at others’ ordinariness — somehow complemented her more conventionally beautiful traits: the feline eyes, the breeze-bouffanted hair, the plush lips, and a physique that came on leaps, bounds andentrechats thanks to ballet sessions at the Conservatoire de Paris.
“There are plenty of beautiful women out there, but she’s beautiful in a non-typical way — distinctive; you know it’s her instantly,” says Ginette Vincendeau, a Professor in Film Studies at King’s College London. “She was such an iconoclastic figure, a taboo breaker, an outrageous figure at the time, and an emblem of the moment when women began to emancipate themselves — sexually, primarily, in her case, but in other ways, too. She was a proto- feminist figure without being a feminist from an ideological point of view. She was both an incredible sex goddess in a conventional way — endlessly displaying herself for the male gaze — but at the same time she really followed her own desires. [Her enigma lay in] that dual nature of being a really strong personality, knowing and getting what she wanted at the same time as being pleasing to men.” So what distinguished her from the sex-kitten clowder? “There were many sex goddesses at the time but they didn’t have the same quality of being so wilful and strong,” Vincendeau said. “Take Marilyn Monroe — there’s something very vulnerable in her as far as sexiness goes. Bardot was tough. One of her most appealing attributes, apart from being so natural and so confident, was that insolence. She answered back. That made her extremely attractive. Things were written about her [at the time] that people wouldn’t be allowed to write any more.”
She was such an iconoclastic figure, and an emblem of the moment women began to emancipate themselves.
Bardot would have concurred — “My wild and free side unsettled some, and unwedged others,” as she once put it — and it’s likely that what finger-waggers in the media couldn’t handle about Bardot, inadvertently at least, was that her sexual potency came from within. Much about her amorous convective core was revealed by some advice she gave to Laetitia Casta, as the younger actress and model prepared to play Bardot in the 2010 biopic Gainsbourg (Vie Héroïque). Casta reported: “[Bardot] said, ‘When you walk into a room, put your head up and look like you want to fuck everybody’.” Casta’s performance in the movie suggests she was a master of emulation, but Bardot, who once referred to herself as “a lousy actress”, surely didn’t need to pretend to have a vociferous carnal appetite. Not if what we know of her prodigious love life was anything to go by.
Rites of passage
Brigitte Bardot wasn’t brought up to be a symbol of postwar licentiousness (in 1958, when she was 24, the French language news weekly Paris-Match called her “immoral, from head to toe”). She was born in 1934 in sleepy interwar France. Her father was a wealthy industrialist, and Bardot and her younger sister, Marie- Jeanne (‘Mijanou’), had a stiff, conventional upper-middle-class upbringing in a seven-bedroom apartment in the plush 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel Tower. So how did she become the serial seductress that Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1959 essay The Lolita Syndrome, portrayed as the most liberated female of prudish postwar European society?
The rites of passage came thick and fast when she was still young: by the time Bardot reached the age of 19, she had done her first Elle magazine cover story, carried out her first suspected suicide attempt, and met the first of four husbands (Roger Vadim, who was an assistant to the filmmaker who first spotted her, Marc Allégret). Vadim, a former journalist and photographer, was six years Bardot’s senior when she began an affair with him aged 16 (“He was exciting because for her he represented bohemia and sexual freedom, and she took to that and enjoyed moving into this milieu,” Vincendeau says).
Vadim went on to direct Bardot in Et Dieu... Créa La Femme, which quickly made her internationally famous but also caused the relationship’s demise: on set in Saint-Tropez, Bardot fell in love with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant. While shooting love scenes, the pair’s lips would apparently stay locked together long after the poor spouse in the director’s chair had hollered a beseeching, “Cut!” It was one of several marital transgressions by both parties, and, five years after their glitzy nuptials at Notre-Dame cathedral, they divorced.
A couple of years later she married the impossibly handsome Jacques Charrier, with whom she’d starred in Babette Goes to War — a union that led to Bardot giving birth to her only offspring, with no little reluctance. In her 1995 memoir, Initiales B.B., Bardot describes her mortification at discovering she was pregnant, in 1959, aged 24: “I looked at my flat, slender belly in the mirror like a dear friend upon whom I was about to close a coffin lid.”
But it was her third marriage that sent the glamour and hedonism in her life into overdrive — to Gunter Sachs (a man whose qualification as a polymath is underlined by the description of him in the Sotheby’s catalogue: “Playboy, businessman, gallerist, museum director, art collector, filmmaker, celebrity, photographer, astrologer, director and sportsman”). The romance began in May 1966, when the two met through Bardot’s younger sister, Mijanou, in Gassin, a village near Saint-Tropez. “I’d already known and loved many men, I’d had passionate affairs,” Bardot wrote in her autobiography. “But that evening I was hypnotised. I seemed to be flying, as if carried by Gunter into a fairytale world I had never known and would never know again.”
