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Richard Jernigan -> RE: charming the ladies (Mar. 17 2006 7:50:11)
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I was madly in love with my fantasy of Brigitte Bardot when I was 18 and she was 19. The opening scene of "And God Created Woman" was a lingering, minute exploration of the detailed geography of her 19-year old nude body. Heady stuff for the mid-1950s. Thirty-odd years later I drove down from Santa Barbara to see a screening of a restored print at the Directors' Guild in Hollywood. After the film someone read a short piece by the pioneering French feminist Simone de Beauvoir. She said Bardot was interesting because she refused to be simply a sex object. Despite her enormous sensuality and sexual magnetism, she always made you see her as a person in every film.
Yes. In "And god Created woman", despite intentionally and calculatedly destroying the lives of three brothers with her irresistible sexual attraction, she made you see that she was doing it almost out of fear, to protect herself. To protect herself not so much from the brothers, any one of whom would have married her and devoted his life to her. Not to protect herself from the brothers' parents, who took her into their house as an act of charity. But to protect herself, almost in retrospect, from the exploitation she had suffered just a few years before.
Would I have stooped to playing like Manitas to charm the pants off Bardot? When I was 18, in a New York minute! Make that a New York second!
But others say that taking on Manitas as a boyfriend for a while was of a piece with her campaign for kindness to animals.
RNJ
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