And God Created Woman (Patreon)

34/100

As noted previously (in less-than-glowing reviews of The Devil Is a Woman and That Obscure Object of Desire), I have very little tolerance for movies that view female sexuality as a half-sadistic, half-oblivious abyss into which hapless men can't help but plummet. This particular example compounds the problem by choosing Brigitte Bardot—whom I find tediously vacuous even in Contempt—as its siren...though Vadim subsequently managed to make Jane Fonda look like a brain-dead kewpie doll, so it probably didn't matter much who was cast. Matter to me, that is—obviously, it was Bardot's specific sex-kitten persona that made the film a sensation at the time and has since prevented it from fading into well-deserved obscurity. (Et tu, Criterion?) Certainly there's little inherent appeal to the film's tepid "love" quadrangle, which sees Juliette marry an uncharacteristically bland Jean-Louis Trintignant at the behest of unscrupulous businessman Curt Jurgens, even though she still carries a torch for love-'em-and-leave-'em Christian Marquand. Most scenes consist of an excuse to have Bardot wear as few clothes as possible without crossing the line into visible nudity (hence the lewd Contempt ad campaign a few years later: “Bardot is the body beautiful…she knows it…and she shows it!”); I'm by no means anti-sensuality, but this feels like the r/GoneMild version of a nudie-cutie. Pretty much the only thing that kept me awake, up until the climactic dance sequence, was Vadim's intermittent expert use of the widescreen frame—one quick montage sequence in which Michel seeks counsel about his impending marriage includes a magnificent composition with Michel in the background at frame right, a priest's hands filling the bowl of his pipe in the foreground at frame left, and a cross dominating the otherwise negative space between them. Not magnificent enough to outweigh Juliette showing newfound respect for Michel after he finally loses his temper and slaps her, though.

ANAL-RETENTIVE TITLE CORNER: The original French title is et Dieu...créa la femme, which Criterion mimics in English on the cover of its DVD: ...and God created woman. Had they been consistent about that, I'd have gone with it, but the DVD's back cover repeatedly calls the film And God Created Woman. The use of lowercase on the front thus appears to be mere stylization (Vadim and Bardot's names are likewise in lowercase), even though it echoes the French title—French has entirely different capitalization rules than does English—and I'm also inclined to ignore the ellipsis, given that it's (a) not consistently employed and (b) in the wrong place, for some reason.