louis malle who just made his first two films with Moreau, to Privacy (Private Life, 1962) undertook the ambitious task of redefining the film persona bardot, to show her different character, to turn the entire spectacle tied around her in the necessary direction by emphasizing the difference between the (public) image and the (hidden) character of the greatest European female star at that moment. It is no wonder that Bardot does almost nothing throughout the film, locked in a room or a hotel: the star is the center of attention because she is an event in herself, she 'designs' the frame even when she has no dramaturgical function, she is a visual purpose in herself.
Hello Privacy treats the quasi-biography as a voyeuristic expertise, but the problems arise when the director starts to moralize the whole situation by following the invasion and pressure of the media on the character of Jill. Why did the director suddenly decide to draw a line between his observation and the journalistic invasion of privacy, to establish a demarcation line between two modes, one of which sees the star as an eroticized spectacle, while the other turns her into a victim? Wasn't Malle hypocritically trying to silence the sensuality and dedication of his mise-en-scène in this way, especially in the final shots where Jill, who (we assume, fatally) falls from the building, is transformed, perhaps ethereally and perhaps even vulgarly, into a privileged object of beauty.
If Malle is openly benevolent and well-intentioned in his own analysis, which is centered around various manifestations of the BB phenomenon, Jean-Luc Godard in an absolute masterpiece Contempt (Contempt, 1963) - with Murnau's Nosferatu (1921), the greatest European film of all time - is brilliantly critical. When Bardot was sent the script for the film, she said: 'Great, I'm in the new wave'. Godard, who knew that Bardot's presence would provide him with the largest budget of his entire career (which, of course, turned out to be a very accurate prediction), was nevertheless under enormous pressure, both from the producers and the whims of the 'spoiled star' (for example, the director had to walk on his hands so that Bébé would take pity on him and cut her, shall we say, beautiful tousled hair), and from his own doubts and ambivalences (for him, the film was, after all, a very personal reflection of his turbulent relationship with Anom Karinom), so there was a lot of nervousness and anxiety on the set, which was besieged by paparazzi. The result? Contempt is Godard's calmest, most contemplative, most classic film, marked by elegant long shots, and Bardot - regardless of all the irritations caused, the director's sometimes caustic comments - is the most beautifully painted, placed at a discursive distance, which is a reflection of the distance that her character Camille will feel towards her husband Paul (Michel Piccoli).
When producers, especially American Joseph Levine, realizing that Godard had not filmed a single nude scene with Bardot, ultimately asked him to provide them with the necessary commercial ingredient (for which they paid the most), Godard came up with an ingenious way to 'legally' do the job, and elevate the film to another anthological frame. While the lovers lie on the bed, and we only see the naked Camille from behind, the director - who was supposed to deliver almost sexploitation footage - by changing the filter (in the colors of the French flag, because BB is, among other things, a national symbol, their most famous Marianne) does not allow the viewer to 'enjoy' the scene, but instead shifts the emphasis to the 'non-realistic' dialogue: the most desirable body of that era is fetishistically 'dissected' linguistically in its erotic cataloguing, in a sensual enumeration of its parts, only to bring about a 'unifying' conclusion, in such a typical Godard sentence that, due to alliteration, sounds not only like a maxim, but also a polished verse: 'Oui, je t'aime totalement, tendrement, tragiquement'.
Ali, Le Contempt is also a film - as the title itself testifies - in which the female subject is constituted as a subject of (negative) desire: a female transition from love to - contempt (not hatred). Bardot's task was to make this transition (more precisely, a cut for which there is no decoupage) on which the entire film rests - because, such is female desire - enigmatic, without being able to point a finger at it precisely. Le Contempt is a film about a film, and in this metafilm the screenwriter, director and producer are constantly declaiming, quoting, expressing their intentions and world views, but only Camille remains 'unread': Bardot's face is inscrutable, even when her character makes a decision. And another detail that may seem accidental, but is in fact (poetically) legitimate: although as a die-hard Hitchcockian I think it is Bernard herrmann the greatest film composer and that they Vertigo i Psycho the highlights of all music of the second half of the twentieth century, yet the best soundtrack in the history of the seventh art is signed by Geogres Delerue za Le Contempt, where it is no coincidence, in clear inspiration, that the most beautiful theme is the one named after Camille, so, ultimately, after Brigitte Bardot.
In 1973, Bardot stopped making films. Maybe because she was bored with everything, maybe because there were no more directors who knew what to do with BB fame, maybe because she wanted, like Garbo, to keep the mystery until the end, perhaps because withdrawal is the last possibility of graceful resignation. A woman's desire is always illegible, especially when it is definitive, when it is not given up on, despite everything. With this move, Bardot, who was 'bigger than the film', in fact, decides to become an inseparable part of film history again. The most photographed woman in the world, however, continues to last most intensely in special film moments, in privileged shots, in the mise-en-scène of great masters, however many there were. Icons survive in visual space, not in the political mud of everyday life.
One such shot - viewed in a new, mournful context - gains visual power as a melodramatic epilogue and captivating dedication, recorded by a director who much preferred cynical points, and his surrender to that tender sentimentality should be valued as an authentic aesthetic act. Clouzot, in whose oeuvre, similarly to that of Kubrick, there aren't too many emotional scenes, in Truth has given in to the iconographic obligation: Dominique, the character played by Bardot (and in whom she proves, as we have seen, that she knows how to act), lying in half-profile, in close upin which it painfully illuminates the final reflection of beauty, takes its last breath and then - the end. That sad frame, after all and especially now, stands as a sublimation, a decadent, symbolic, but also mimetic confirmation Poevog the dictum that 'the death of a beautiful woman is without a doubt the most poetic theme in the world'.
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