an icon of cinema between shadow and light

For many, it was an apparition. That of the film “And God…created woman”, in 1956. Brigitte Bardot, 22 years old, is immortalized there by her husband Roger Vadim as a rebellious young wife, dancing the mambo in a nightclub, barefoot, slit skirt and swirling hair.

This daring move is a masterstroke that brings in $21 million in revenue worldwide. Nearly a century later, the international star, with 48 feature films, 76 songs and 4 spouses, has just passed away, at the age of 91.

“In my eyes, she embodied women’s freedom in all its dimensions, in appearance, speech and action. I wore her gingham dresses,” confides Ghislaine, an 86-year-old retiree.

A dazzling debut

It is to this fierce singularity that the young girl, born in 1934 and raised in a bourgeois family in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, owes her dazzling trajectory. Not very talented at school, she shines at the dance conservatory. From the age of 15, she made her mark on the front pages of fashion magazines and, at 18, married Roger Vadim, who offered her the tailor-made role of Lolita in “And God… Created Woman”: “I wasn’t playing, I was!”, she admitted in her biography “Initiales BB” in 1996.

For her second great success, “La Vérité” (1960) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, she identified again with her character. In the midst of an adulterous relationship with her partner Samy Frey, she plays a seductress accused of a crime of passion who exclaims at the bar of the Assises: “You want to judge me, but you have never lived, never loved!” In 1962, it was her experience as a star fleeing the paparazzi that she injected into “Vie Privée” by Louis Malle.

Bust model for Marianne

It was not until 1963 that the sex symbol ventured into a compositional role in what remains his masterpiece: “Le Mépris.” There she was transformed into an idol by the master of the New Wave Jean-Luc Godard. In the famous opening scene, beauty is certainly naked, but she addresses less the flesh than the need for ideals of her companion played by Michel Piccoli: “Do you find my feet pretty? And my ankles?…”

An aesthetic “shock” for the film critic Antoine de Baecque, which he analyzes in his essay entitled “Bardot”: “Desire is distanced by the duration of the shot, by the red, white and blue color filters (…), while the lyricism of this love poem is underlined by the music of Georges Delerue.” Having become iconic, the actress was chosen in 1969 to serve as the model for the bust of Marianne.

From star to activist

At the beginning of the 1970s, when she was not yet 40 years old, the star decided to put an end to her career which she considered “futile” and to devote herself body and soul to a cause: the protection of animals. In 1972, after a long lobbying campaign, she obtained the widespread use of the gun in all slaughterhouses in France to limit the suffering of livestock.

Five years later, his highly publicized mobilization against seal hunting resulted in a ban on the importation of their skins into France. In 1986, the activist took another step forward and sold the vestiges of her glory (dresses, jewelry, photos, etc.) at auction to finance the creation of her Foundation.

Between solar myth and reactionary drift

Despite these advances, the one who says she is “disgusted by humanity” retreats to her house in Saint-Tropez, La Madrague, and abandons herself to a reactionary drift. From the 1990s, she increased her diatribes against immigrants, Islam and homosexuals. Between 1997 and 2021, she was convicted six times by the courts for inciting racial hatred.

“It’s obviously not the Bardot that I admired,” says Ghislaine. But I believe that what she crystallized at the turn of the 1960s, in particular with her song La Madrague: the ardor of summer and youth, will remain of her. A series on France 2 had also put her back in the spotlight in 2023, focusing on the end of her adolescence, where she had opened up, for an entire generation, the field of possibilities.