And God Created Woman

By Chuck Stephens
Released in Paris, to little initial acclaim, in 1956, And God Created Woman
was scarcely Brigitte Bardots first film. By most filmographers reckonings, it wa
s her seventeenth. You mean to say you dont remember The Girl in the Bikini? How
about Neros Big Weekend? Never mind, youre not alone.
So why should it be, some forty-plus years since And God Created Womans incep
tion, that Roger Vadims directorial debutwhich went on to gross $4 million in box-
office receipts when it was released in America in1958remains so fondly misrememb
ered as the cinematic birthplace of the extraordinary Bardot? Could it be that V
adim (19282000), a fellow-traveler with fashion-model existentialists and a forme
r journalist for Paris-Match, knew something his predecessors had not? He was, a
fter all, his 21-year-old starlets husband, and had been her lover since she was
just fifteen: She was my wife, my daughter, and my mistress, he later wrote. Was i
t Vadims familiarity with his material, and his ability to tailor it to the conto
urs of Bardots natural talents, that produced such results? And would, eventually
, such familiarity breed Contempt?
Roger Vadim is with it, wrote Jean-Luc Godard, then still a critic, in 1957. And
in Vadims films, Godard claimed to have foundas he had in the collaborations betw
een Frank Tashlin and Jayne Mansfielda truly modern cinema. Vadim, who later clai
med to have coined the term discotheque, would surely have agreed. I felt like the
young Bonaparte at the beginning of his Italian campaign, Vadim claimed, some thi
rty years later, of his first day on the set, I felt certain of victory. Those wor
ds come from Vadims 1987 little-black-book-like memoir, Bardot Deneuve Fonda, a c
hronicle of the conquests, onscreen and off, of the director whose films, as the
years went by, sank ever lower into misanthropic depths. Let his epitaph remain
Pretty Maids All in a Row, in which a womanizers sexual victories are indistingu
ishable from his passion for serial killing. If God created woman, could Vadim h
ave created Bardot? We know only this: both God and Vadim are dead, while Bardotw
hose taunting nakedness seemed suddenly, and perhaps only coincidentally, to att
ain a kind of beatification under Vadims guiding pawlives on.
David Thomson once noted that the appearance of Bardot, sunning in her bikin
i on the beach, remedied Europes lingering postwar austerityyet it seemed that som
ething more magical still was at play upon those sands. More a force against rea
son, or a blinding special effectnot unlike Einsteins equations, or Elviss pelvisBar
dot warped cultural memory as easily as she bent a projector-beam of light. She c
omes, Vadim later wrote, from another dimension. [Once] people spotted her, they c
ouldnt take their eyes off of her. Thats down to her presence, which comes from ou
ter space somewhere. Super-abundant and extraterrestrial, Bardot was far too huma
n, yet far beyond real. Once seen, she could not be unseen, and in And God Created
Woman, she was seen as never before.
An adolescent Eve in the serpent-filled Eden, Bardot plays Juliette, the fro
wsy free spirit of St. Tropez: an entity so natural that shoes seem to betray he
r feet, and on whom nothing seems as pornographic as a wedding dress. Juliette r
uns on instinct, spurning the advances of leering millionaire Carradine (Curd Jrg
ens), but lusting after a hulking cad named Antoine (Christian Marquand). When A
ntoine in turn spurnsJuliette, she impulsively marries his sincere but rather nav
e younger brother, Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Eventually, Juliette will br
ave fire and sea, ecstasy and despair, andas a result of her unquenchable desireer
upt into a kind of Mambo-inspired madness. But when Vadim first unveils her, we
see her as the serpents do: naked in the garden. There lies Brigitte, Time magazin
e announced of the moment, forking its tongue, stretched from end to end of the C
inemaScope screen, bottoms up and bareas a censors eyeball.
 Designed to steam viewers glasses rather than polish their lenses, And God Cr
eated Woman had a similar effect on those censors, whose eyes, upon contact with
BB, began to fill with fogand outrage. At the films initial screening for the Par
isian censors, Vadim later reported, one became so incensed that he demanded tha
t the scene in which Bardot is photographed bottomless, parading before a teenag
e boy, be removed. Vadim chuckled and reran the scene for the censor; there was
no such scene. Bardot was, in fact, wearing a black leotard throughout the entir
e episode.The censor insisted that Vadim had shot two versions, and had somehow
substituted them by sleight-of-hand. That was one of the most amazing things abou
t Brigittes presence on film, Vadim mused. People often thought she was naked when
she wasnt.
Her ass is a song, someone admires of Bardot early on in And God Created Woman
. Perhaps they meant a sirens wail. For, from that moment of creation on, Bardotse
x symbol, superstar, icon, miragebecame the tune that lodged in historys head, the
song that lured censors toward fog-hidden rocks and smashed forever the prudish
hulls of sexually prohibitive cinema. And when Godard cast Bardot in his wither
ing Contempta cryptic remake of And God Created Woman in which sex, marriage, and
filmmaking perish together in a Ballardian crashhe sang her song from the highes
t mountains while his camera loitered on her lower extremes. Yet if Contempt is
the summation of Bardots naked rise to fame, it is also a meditation on her magic
. In it, Bardot explains to her husbanda French screenwriter who fancies himself
a sour Dean Martin (played by Michel Piccoli)the parable of Martin and the ass. Ma
rtin rides his ass to the market, she says, where he trades it in for a magic carp
et. When the carpet refuses to fly, Martin asks the carpet merchant what the pro
blem could be. In order for the carpet to fly, the merchant tells him, you must for
get about that ass.
If Martin forgets the ass, his carpet will fly, and from on high, new worlds
hell see. But Vadim was no Martin; he was, instead, a mere rug vendor who knew t
hat, with the right sales pitch, he could sell the dream of flying carpets. And
with And God Created Womana bold, sometime ridiculous, and altogether indelible f
ilmhe did just that. Yet what Vadim never seemed to recognize sufficiently was th
e very thing that neither God nor Godard would dare deny. That Brigitte Bardota f
orce beyond reason whose very being seemed to merge both unforgettable ass and m
agic carpet ridemight have a flight plan all her own.
Chuck Stephens is the film critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a freq
uent contributor to Film Comment, and West Coast Editor of Filmmaker magazine.