The complex legacy of Brigitte Bardot

A post in two parts

Part One

It feels like a complex legacy, but only if viewed through the lens of current culture. There are three key aspects to the remembering of Bardot's life. She was a film actress, very beautiful, very strong willed, quite talented; then for a large part of her life she was an animal rights activist; and for a less long part of her life, she dabbled in far right politics, and said too many unfortunate things too often. Much of the commentary on her death has been along the lines of acting and animal rights great, politics not so much. Those are the obituaries and the commentaries from the liberal press. I have not found the commentaries from the illiberal press.

While I am largely in tune with the tone of the obituaries I have seen, I feel that they gloss over the complex truths of a life that we have seen largely through a camera lens.

I haven't delved into her life story in detail. I have not read a biography. There is much that I do not know. But it seems to me that to understand her, we need much greater insight into her youth, particularly her teenage years living in Paris under nazi occupation. Her maturing must have been influenced by the need for constant guarding against the possibility of betrayal and arbitrary punishment, the constant need to keep secrets, even if there were no secrets to keep. Family must have played a part too; her father was capable of viciously beating his children, and it appears he felt justified in doing so.

Her part in cinematic history, I feel, has probably been overdone in the eulogies I've read. She made a difference; she brought to the screen a woman who could be herself, make her own mind up, rather than being a two dimensional projection of patriarchy. But other women were doing the same thing at the same time, and not just in the sphere of film.

With regard to her politics and her personal statements about people from other cultures, I regard her views and her actions as abhorrent. While the far right might find material to idolise, I cannot think of her as a very influential player in the right wing game. Her chief achievements seem to have been to say things so egregiously unacceptable that she found herself repeatedly convicted and fined. That is not very clever. She is a bit part player at best. The French far right is confecting an argument to have a national monument to her. Given that de Gaulle once said of her that she is an export as important to France as Renault cars, it will not be difficult to achieve that, but it will be interesting to see what form the monument takes.

I hope that history will eventually look at her in a rather deeper way. I don't mean by that that it will excuse her nastiness. To understand all is not to forgive all. But it will put it in a more detailed and better excavated context. My sense is that her willpower did not come with a sense of direction. I suspect that a more dispassionate historical assessment will eventually come to a similar conclusion that will explain, though not excuse, the way she directed animosity at certain other people. And there is an issue to be explored about how a woman so composed and self possessed in other aspects of her life could not help crudely and repeatedly overstepping the bounds when it came to other races and cultural traditions.

Part Two

Channel Four are promoting the series Bardot, which they've had on Walter Presents for a little while. I have watched it so you don't have to.

(My opinion of the series is completely divorced from my opinion of Bardot. If the series had been well done, I would have persisted to the end, no matter how distasteful the subject eventually turned out to be.)

I really suggest you don't bother with it. To be precise about what I actually did, I watched three episodes out of six, before I gave up hoping it would get better. It is trite, shallow and banal. It doesn't examine any of the really interesting things in Bardot's life. The lowest point for me was that it deals with 15 year old Bardot's introduction to, and subsequent relationship with, 22 year old Roger Vadim as just another part of the story with no acknowledgement whatsoever about a 15 year old girl being in a sexual relationship - no matter how "mature" or strong willed she is. And apart from that, to be honest, it's just dull.

There was one good moment in the three episodes I watched. She leaves Vadim for co-star Jean-Louis Trintagnant. Trintagnant is doing his military service and is likely to be posted into danger in Algeria. She wants to keep him safe in Paris and wangles a meeting with a junior defence minister who is very happy to meet her. He agrees to do as she asks, but she has to have sex with him. She walks out in disgust. Later she realises that one of the directors of the production company she is working with is a close relative of France's justice minister. The justice minister, it turns out, is happy to help - genuinely help. He calls a meeting at which he blisteringly humiliates the defence minister, and sends him away with the instruction to make sure Trintagnant stays in France. At this point we do not have the names of either the justice minister or the junior defence minister. As the defence minister leaves with his tail between his legs, Bardot embraces the justice minister, and says, "Thank you, M Mitterand".