The Constant Nympho

...You have never seen more of Bardot," proclaims the advertisement for the latest film with feigned naivete...

...For example, in Dieu crea la femme, the young bridegroom gets his nose punched on the way back from church and staggers bleeding to the marriage-bed at midday, instead of sitting down to the wedding-breakfast...

...The old-fashioned vamp was always a kind of Delilah—that is, she seduced the man in order to express her power over him or to achieve wealth and security...

...She is attracted to a young man whose avowed intention is just to spend the night with her...

...In Dieu crea la femme, she has a bird and a rabbit (but she doesn't go home to them very often), and in Les bijoutiers du clair de lune she is accompanied by a donkey and a piglet...

...He has to bleed, I take it, because his wife is not a virgin and he has humbly begged her to marry him...

...I was privileged once to know a demi-mondaine, a pure Colette figure, who touched on the professional difficulties raised by the innovation of winter sports: "Vous comprenez, apres avoir fait du ski toute la journee, on n'est guere d'attaque le soir...

...Afterward, she goes downstairs in her dressing-gown to get food for them both...

...it is simply a recognition of the normal promiscuity of modern life...

...I suspect her of being modelled ultimately on Marilyn Monroe...

...it will come off as easily as it went on...

...She wanders off to a low dive and expresses her ungovernable frenzy in a wild dance with a Negro band...

...In Les bijoutiers du clair de lune, the young lover is beaten up in the very first scene, partly to establish the atmosphere of Spanish violence in which everything will take place, and partly to create a bond with the two women looking on who are to be sacrificed to him...

...We are a long way here from the two main traditional French women: (1) the pure jeune fille, who is gay, resourceful and poetic and will grow into a good wife, and (2) the kept woman, seductive, wordly-wise and skilful...

...The husband slaps her face and she smiles and follows him meekly back home...

...The first film ends with the young husband leading the repentant female back to the conjugal nest on the day after her infidelity...

...As for that dreadful concoction, Le rendezvous manque, the only non-boring spot in it was the seduction dance by the magnificent blond vamp, Noelle Adam, who should by rights have been carrying a whip and wearing high, red-leather boots...

...a slight touch of mental deficiency, and this mental deficiency is in itself subtly erotic...

...She kicks off her shoes at every opportunity and she is not dressed at all...

...In Les bijoutiers du clair de lune, the heroine has just come home from her convent school, but she announces that she no longer takes a theoretical view of sex and cannot do without the young man who has taken her fancy...

...She veers away and marries his younger brother, who sincerely loves her...

...And what if, at the end of the month, he discovers he is going to be the father of his own nephew...

...she gazes steadily forward and follows her lips, which are already set in a pre-kiss pout: she rides on her hips as if they were a built-in pony...

...If Vadim had just turned his ex-wife into a one-woman nude show, he would not be making a fortune...

...But, judging by the two films I have seen—Dieu crea la femme (And God Created Woman) and Les bijoutiers du clair de lune [not yet released in the U. S.]—and also by the ballet Le rendezvous manque, which seems to have been largely the work of the same man, Roger Vadim, the present young female has, apart from her slight mental deficiency, one or two other characteristics which did not exist in her predecessors...

...There are some historical precedents, however...

...Most of the time it is just fitful pornography, with one or two stabs at a higher meaning...

...at the turn of the 19th century, there was a kind of adolescent grisette who appeared in Courteline and Colette...

...He uses cruelty verging on sadism...

...It may be that Vadim has an uncertain sense of humor...

...On SCREEN The Constant Nympho By J. G. Weightman LONDON IT IS one of the ironies of history, as they say, that France should be represented at this crisis in her fortunes by General de Gaulle and Brigitte Bardot...

...But then she mopes, because she is still physically obsessed with the older youth...

...later, in the 20th century, there were two film-stars, Simone Simon and Cecile Aubry, who specialized in soiled rosebud parts...

...One should no doubt salute a serious mind, whatever its field of operation...

...Bardot is nature's child by giving her a love of animals...

...In the 18th century, Manon Lescaut and a number of girls in the later novels (e.g., Cecile in Les liaisons dangereuses) were really juvenile delinquents...

...It is important to notice that she is not really a woman, but represents the modern retreat into adolescence...

...The fashionable audience would then have had to recognize what it was they were applauding...

...To do Mlle...

...Afterwards, she is upset, partly with remorse, it seems, and partly because of continuing dissatisfaction...

...one is a father-figure, the other is an adolescent, an ingenue libertine, a rosebud slightly crushed...

...A shade more subtle, perhaps, is the attempt to emphasize that Mlle...

...Her husband discovers her dancing and, while he had been prepared to overlook her infidelity, he cannot bear such a public exhibition, so he shoots at her...

...The situation could not be plainer if she carried a banner inscribed: "Do you want a naughty little girl...

...And in both, the photography, color and dialogues are all mediocre...

...Certainly, the major sequence in which the two young lovers fight in the desert and Bardot's dress is ripped off her back, revealing her to be without any underwear at all but still ready for a passionate embrace after several days' acute starvation, stimulates only the diaphragm and the eyebrows...

...But the two films, at least, are not altogether despicable...

...There are other, milder but nevertheless characteristic, episodes...

...Some very unconvincing play is made in both films with the idea that the heroine is an orphan who has not been adequately treated by the adult world...

...The loud bassoon, as it were, has been sounded in their ears...

...Her aunt desires the same young man and, during a pause in her husband's funeral procession, raises her black lace veil to gaze meaningfully into the young man's eyes, so that he can know that the wife is waiting for him, now that he has killed the husband...

...For a few months, Mlle...

...She is blonde and bemused...

...If we take eroticism in the sense of a proper feeling for the tangle of instinct, it is, as the best people have always known and as practically everybody knows by now, a major constituent of all good art...

...Otherwise, she has the earthy nakedness of a perpetual holiday in the South of France...

...She has only one postiche feature, the mane of flaming red-gold hair she displays in the more dramatic scenes...

...I don't remember ever before seeing a film in which the theme was the openly expressed physiological urge of the female...

...The wife wipes away the blood and makes love to him...

...A fortiori, after a week's starvation in the desert...

...she is wearing some simple smock or sack or shift that has a two-way look about it—that is...

...Bardot justice, she utters all these bits with a sly incredulity which demolishes them there and then...

...Le grand Charles et la petite Brigitte...

...The shot misses but wakes her up from her trance...

...to give it its correct literary credentials...

...La femme est en rut, etc...

...This may be meant to indicate (if it is not just put in because animals go down well in films) that the physiological drive is connected with motherhood, which would be fine if the rest of the plot were organized realistically...

...In this, she is poles apart from Marlene Dietrich, Edwige Feuillere, Martine Carol, etc...

...The heroine of Dieu crea la femme is a child of nature, with a love of sunshine, food and fun...

...He plucks a spray of orange blossom from a branch outside the window and slowly and carefully makes her a headdress with the flowers, thus re-establishing ceremonial, in a poetic way, within the outlaw society of two...

...The second film, too, gets more and more unrealistic as it goes on and finishes in a romantic mush, with the little sex kitten turning into a great metaphysical lover and dying sublimely, rather like la dame aux camelias...

...Like all serious eroticists, he works on the deeper principle: du sang, de la volupte et de la mort...

...perhaps Vadim owes something to his Russian origins...

...It may excite old people over 30, but it cannot appear very remarkable, except for its technical perfection, to the average young man who goes bathing with his sisters and girl friends...

...For instance, in Les bijoutiers du clair de lune, when the young man is about to get into bed with the young woman for the first time, she explains that this is a unique moment for her...

...It will be clear that I regard these three productions as being mainly pornographic...

...It is contrary to ancient French wisdom...

...If you sit at a cafe table in the open air in Paris, your attention is idly engaged by the fact that every thirtieth girl or so who passes is an imitation Bardot...

...In the two films there are occasional good pagan touches, apart from the wedding-breakfast scene already mentioned...

...The weakness is that in neither film is the eroticism well enough organized to keep it on the level of art, or integrated with any philosophical attitude...

...Bardot will have been the naked figure around which the French flag traditionally wraps and unwraps itself...

...Later, however, when her uncle chases her across the countryside with the intention of spanking her, the film threatens to collapse into the grotesque funniness which is never far removed from solemn eroticism...

...At the same time, he has been beaten up in her defense, so that the blood also gives him a certain authority over her...

...As an unknown, pseudu-French philosopher once wrote: La frivolite est inscrite dans Yunivers mime...

...The moral obviously is that a girl like that needs to be symbolically murdered, and then beaten, before she can understand that her husband is really virile...

...This is a really good passage, reminiscent of the barbaric touches in the best old Soviet films...

...To begin with, she is sunburned, physically healthy and undressed...

...But Vadim's principal trick, I think, and one which shows how modern he is, is to place desire primarily in the woman...

...The probation officer is just round the corner, as it were...

...Apres le droit de vote, le droit a Vorgasme," as somebody else has put it...

...But this is quite innocent...

...Being French, she is presented as a harder, more direct, creature, but like Miss Monroe she portrays characters with J. G. Weightman, who here examines the phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot and its implications, is an editor of The Twentieth Century, where a longer version of this article was originally published...

...She provokes him in various ways, finally biting him on the shoulder with plain animal irritation which produces the required effect...

...Or she fell in love and was looking for a reciprocation of the sentiment...

...The best that can be said for them, then, is that both are commercial products made by someone with a serious, if patchy, interest in lasciviousness...

...The young heroine, Bardot, is humiliated when a shelf on which she is kneeling collapses and this starts off a half-humorous, half-hysterical pillow-fight with her aunt, who is sexually her rival: this scene has the ring of truth about it...

...But it is just thrown together...

...sex is natural but sex is also wicked, thank God...

...She loads a tray from the table under the noses of the wedding guests, who are dumbfounded by this outburst of instinct...