Friday, September 26, 2014

The French don't have a word for it

But this Sunday Brigitte Bardot--whom Paris-Match once called "immoral, from head to toe"--turns four*twenty;


These days her passion is confined to saving animals and blocking immigration, but in the 1950s;
The innocent jeune fille grew [from a teenage ballerina], in just a few years, into a sex symbol. In 1957, age 23, she made cinematic history in And God Created Woman, her husband Roger Vadim's seminal film, where her exploding sensuality is as graceful as ever, and never lewd. In a famous scene, she dances as if in a trance, barefoot, her skin glowing with sweat, her hair wild and loose. Her thighs, that of a dancer, are tanned, strong and muscular. She is so far from the neat and constructed image of Hollywood stars of the time that, when the film was released in America, it provoked outrage on a continental scale. When they saw those pearls of sweat, American men went wild. Movie managers daring to show such a film were prosecuted, the film was banned in some states and newspaper articles denounced the depravity of it all. As a result, the film proved an even greater box-office success and the furore travelled back to Europe.
"Ban Bardot!" advocated the morality leagues as if she were some kind of illegal drug.
Today it's her political opinions that are illegal in France, she's been fined for 'incitement to hatred' by the courts and;  In 2012, she supported the Front National leader Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election.

No comments:

Post a Comment