When French film director Roger Vadim died last month, most of the obituaries dealt less with his work and more with the fact that he had been married to or had romantic relationships with some of the most beautiful film actresses of his time. Vadim's romantic relationships were intertwined with his professional life, though, and many of those actresses had their careers launched or boosted by appearing in his movies. The best-known example is Brigitte Bardot, probably the most famous French movie icon of the 20th century, who married Vadim in the early 1950s. She reached world-wide fame by starring in her husband's 1956 melodrama ...And God Created Woman, a film that pushed the limits of screen erotica in its time.
Brigitte Bardot plays the heroine of the film, Juliette, an 18-year-old orphan who lives with her foster parents in the small French Riviera town of St. Tropez. Juliette is a sexually attractive woman, an object of desire among the entire male population of the town, and, being quite aware of it, she takes delight in teasing men by dressing and acting provocatively. Nobody is immune to her charms, including the wealthy businessman Carradine (played by Curd Jürgens), but Juliette is going out with Antoine Tardieu (played by Christian Marquand), the eldest son in the family of impoverished local shipbuilders. Antoine and everyone else are going to lose her, though, because her foster parents have had enough of the scandals and want to send her back to the orphanage. When Carradine suggests that she could be saved from such a fate by marrying one of the local boys, Antoine's shy younger brother Michel (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) suddenly volunteers for the job. Because of the bride's slutty reputation, everyone in town ridicules the marriage, but the newlyweds suddenly realise that they love each other. Their idyll ends when Antoine returns to the town, as Juliette can't resist the opportunity to cheat on her husband.
The script by Vadim and Roger Levy is simple, hardly original and more in the class of television soap operas than great cinema classics. Observations of social relationships in a small town (the way that people's actions are led more by their wallets than by their feelings) are only hinted at and not explored enough. The characters are hardly memorable, although they are played by more than capable actors (especially in the case of Curd Jürgens and the young Jean-Louis Trintignant). Vadim is, however, never hampered by the lack of content in his picture, and he compensates by packing it into a visually attractive film. The colours are bright, the locations quite charming and the new Cinemascope technique is used with great skill. But the biggest attraction of the film is, of course, Brigitte Bardot. She not only looks stunningly beautiful, she uses all her acting talent to simply ooze raw sexuality from the screen, creating a character that seems to be the living embodiment of male sexist ideals—a woman who is both virgin and slut at the same time. Vadim enhances his wife's seductive abilities by using Cinemascope to show her body in ways it was never shown in mainstream cinema before. Her first appearance in the film—sunbathing in the nude—might seem quite tame, almost kindergarten material by our standards, but it must have been quite shocking for a 1950s audience. However, despite being almost half a century old, this cheap melodrama still possesses a certain charm that has endured, just as the legend of Bardot has.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in its original form was posted in Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.reviews on March 23rd 2000)
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