And God created Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Bardot in a scene from ‘La Femme et le Pantin’, 1959

It was a movie that blasted through the 1950s like the Sputnik mission that was to follow a couple of years later. A breathless trailer had warned as much: “Set in the pagan paradise of the French Riviera, swirls the demon-driven temptress who thought the future was invented ... only to spoil the present.” The temptress was pictured in various states of semi-nudity, while a succession of men’s faces gazed at her sternly. They had good cause for their perplexity. The postwar world, and its fragile moral framework, was a dark and joyless place, until God created Bardot.

Brigitte Bardot – BB – celebrates her 75th birthday next month, yet those scenes from Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, saturated in bright primary colours and impending moral collapse, still retain the power to shock. The tale is flimsy and the script indifferent. But nobody was following plot or dialogue. Audiences were fixated instead on the film’s young star, who was in the act of changing what was deemed acceptable to portray on film, and what it was like to be a star.

In the pantheon of sexy blonde archetypes, Bardot stood apart. She was no studio-manufactured glamourpuss in the style of Marilyn Monroe, nor a self-manufactured tigress in the style of Madonna. Uniquely, she gave every impression of not having been manufactured at all, which was a disturbing phenomenon for studio bosses and male hegemony alike. A sex kitten, said the popular press of the time, resorting to kitsch imagery. But she was a whole lot more complicated than that.

US audiences, prim yet enraptured, became obsessed with BB. Vadim’s film grossed some $4m in the US, much more than it had in France. “Bardot is as important an export as Renault automobiles,” observed Simone de Beauvoir in her perceptive 1959 essay “Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome”, a welcome reminder of a time when intellectuals were genuinely fascinated by popular culture.

De Beauvoir cut through the clichés, understanding the otherness of Bardot’s compelling performance in Vadim’s film. “She is neither perverse nor rebellious nor immoral,” she wrote. “That’s why morality does not have a chance with her.” Bardot became existentialism’s pin-up girl, swinging a hip for all those thick-rimmed-spectacled brainboxes who also thought that the future was invented only to spoil the present, but who lacked her easy eloquence.

Vadim, the svengali’s svengali (cf Catherine Deneuve, Jane Fonda) met Bardot when she was 18 and attested to her innocence. She thought that mice laid eggs, he said. The subtle ways of the animal kingdom were still beyond her. De Beauvoir gave us a hint of future obsession: “In all of her films, she likes animals.”

She must have identified with them. No star was ever hunted down like Bardot. Her emergence coincided, more or less, with the birth of another unstoppable phenomenon: the paparazzo. Fellini gave the name to the intrusive photographer in his 1959 film La Dolce Vita: the name stuck, as did the phenomenon. So, in a way, the paparazzi too celebrate a birthday, their 50th, this year.

The conjunction of birthdays has not gone unnoticed: at London’s James Hyman gallery next month, the exhibition “Brigitte Bardot and the Original Paparazzi” charts a fascinating course between those hardy street photographers and the woman they loved so much.

At first, she loved them back. The early paparazzi – Marcello Geppetti, Tazio Secchiaroli – were a long way from the sidewalk hooligans who besmirch today’s more febrile show business world. Indeed, Secchiaroli was allowed access to the set of Bardot’s most distinguished film, Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, and used his eye for composition to produce picture-book studies of beauty in repose.

. . .

Here, for a brief period, was a perfect symbiosis of interests: the star who hated to pose mixing it with the photographers who preferred the spontaneous bustle of the street to the spot-lit studio. It was the triumph of the casual, the cool, the carefree, over the control freaks who had thus far dominated popular culture’s protagonists. (Poor Elvis, Bardot’s brother-in-carnality-unleashed, never enjoyed the fruits of even that temporary victory, but that’s a different story.)

It was, as I say, a brief period. But its aesthetic lingered. Look at the cover of the current W magazine: a newly discovered picture of Bardot, surely; no, it’s Lara Stone, the latest BB wannabe supermodel. We still love that look: beautiful, untouchable but also relaxed, pliant, natural. A bundle of contradictions, of course. But this was the movies, not a PhD thesis.

The relationship between BB and the lensmen, more prurient by the day, deteriorated. They photographed her when she wanted – finally – some privacy. They photographed her when she left hospital following a suicide attempt. In the meantime, like Elvis, her sense of quality control declined sharply. You would do well to name any of her subsequent films: they were mostly risible.

Bardot learned that mice did not lay eggs, and many other handy animal facts, and began to prefer the company of any creature that was not capable of handling a Nikon. She became semi-reclusive and lost her looks, yet still the paparazzi insisted on pursuing her. The title of the exhibition’s last section tells it all: “Boats and long lenses: Bardot in St Tropez.”

Today she is known for her championing of animal rights, her offensive remarks about any race or religion that does not respect her version of animal rights, and for having once made a film that made teenage heads, and not only heads, throb. But for a while we thought she could save the world. Bob Dylan, no less a figure then, said so, on one of his first albums: “Well, my telephone rang it would not stop, It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up. He said, ‘My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?’ I said, ‘My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot ...’”

I can think of worse economic stimulus packages. Happy birthday, BB.

www.jameshymangallery.com

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden