by Roger Vadim, 1956.
Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Curd Jurgens, Christian Marquand, Georges Poujouly, Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Rating: 8/10, 4.5/10.
Chekhov, as I’m sure you’ve heard, said that if there is a gun in the first act, it should be fired by the third. Watching And God Created Woman, I thought of this. It doesn’t really work, though, if the gun doesn’t show up until halfway through, when Brigitte Bardot is randomly shooting it out a window for no reason.
Since I’m talking about it, a lot about this movie doesn’t really work, technically. Brigitte Bardot, for one thing. Striking she is, good actress she ain’t. The weird split-screen effect where random objects would create a line going right down the middle of the screen and there would be one character on either side, for another. I mean, sure it was interesting, but...um...what was the point? The storyline, too, where fifty billion characters are introduced and then half of them go away and the other half stick around but keep getting themselves into new combinations so it’s ridiculously hard to keep track of, that doesn’t work. There’s an odd lack of subtitles near the end, right before a dance sequence that is utterly ridiculous, pointless, and implausible, and really is only there so they could show off Bardot’s legs. Neither of those things work. The way Bardot sails off on a faulty boat for no reason other than to throw her and her rescuer together doesn’t work, nor does the way the boat goes from very very close to shore to miles away from it in a few seconds.
And yet the movie does work, and is damned entertaining while it does it. There’s a whole lot of family drama in it, which is always good for some fun, and then there’s all the not-working going on, which is fun for a laugh. And there are some things in it—the way a couple scenes almost seemed designed to teach foreigners how to count in French, say—that are hilarious.
Since I don’t have much else to say about the movie except that it was way fun, I’ll just leave you with two more of those hilarious bits.
The first is actually one of the scenes that teaches French counting. At the bookstore (?) where Bardot’s character works, her best friend puts on a record and then starts counting, and it took me a while to figure out that she was dancing. But then suddenly Bardot swings off the counter she was sitting on and yells, "That’s not how you do the mambo! Let me show you!" and then does something that resembles no mambo I’ve ever seen, and sings at the top of her lungs with the record. That made me laugh to no end.
The second was even funnier. It was during a very, VERY confusing dance at which every single one of the fifty billion characters was present and active. But the camera would just be hovering over the crowd, and near the edges women kept saying to their friends, "I’m going to dance. Here, hold my handbag." At one point, as a man approached to ask a pair of women if they would dance, one said that and went off, and when the man asked the remaining woman she said "I can’t, I have to hold her handbag." I’m not describing it very well, but it was really funny.
And there’s not much more to say, really, except that after the movie on the video I had, they had the American trailer, with dubbed dialogue. There were two interesting things about this trailer. The first was that at no point did the voice-over mention a) the name of the director, b) the names of any of the actors, including Bardot, or c) the name of the movie itself. Which is an unusual advertising scheme, if you ask me. Concealment! The other was that the person who dubbed Bardot’s lines was very definitely Jane Fonda. It made me wonder—is this how Vadim met Fonda, whom he married after his marriage to Bardot ended, or did he just have his current wife dub over his ex-wife’s dialogue? Either way, very strange, and it made me notice that Vadim quite definitely had a particular type: shapely, large-eyed, slightly vacant-looking but still quite pretty women with lots of big-curled blonde hair. Interesting, that.
ps. Sorry about the utterly spastic picture. It was the best i could find. Well, you try!