Shortly before I had been to see And God Created Woman ('But the devil made Bardot' added slyly suggestive cinema posters). But I can't particularly blame this film (made in 1956 by her first husband, Roger Vadim) for the pervasive assumption that she was crying out for young men. Everything I had heard and seen put this fundamental faith up in neon lights. And when I sat in the barber's shop and pored over these tantalizing stills of Bardot, I was more than ever converted.
I blame Mike Sarne. In September 1966 he was co-starring with Bardot in a film called Two Weeks in September. They were filming in Scotland. It was cold and wet. He loaned her his cardigan. After that all they had to do was find somewhere warm in order to take the cardigan off again. The fact that she had married German playboy Gunther Sachs a mere two months or so beforehand just didn't enter into the equation. Five minutes after Sachs had flown out of Scotland, she was giving an interview ' still at the airport ' in which she revealed she was already feeling lonely: 'I am living on memories' Unfortunately no one can live on memories.'
Instead of looking at photographs I was seeing the words: 'Bardot needs YOU!' She was a Female Don Juan (hence the title of one of her films, And if Don Juan Was a Woman). It was the kind of attitude that led Salvador Dali to hypthesize that she was born a man and had simply undergone an extremely successful sex-change operation. And it led me and my fellow 15-year old friend Griffo to sign up and troop off to St Tropez. We were ready to do our duty.
St Tropez was the Garden of Eden of the 60s and BB was Eve. Griffo and I were not alone in wanting to be Adam. Years later, at a school reunion, I had a conversation with a man who had once been a boy I barely knew, and he said: 'What! You mean you went to St Tropez too?' At that time young men in their hundreds, in their thousands, innumerable hordes, were parachuting in on her sexual Shangri-La, 'La Madrague': they were swimming, pedaloing, or being lowered by helicopter. It was the inescapable destination. It would never have occurred to any of this madding crowd (least of all to me) that they might be uninvited guests. Unwanted? Ridiculous! She was sucking us in.
Donkeys, looking at these very same photographs, would have a different story to tell. One at least lived the dream. His name was 'Romeo.'
It was during the filming of Shalako with Sean Connery in Spain. His owner was giving him one of his regular beatings when Bardot intervened, bought him, and took him back to her hotel. When she heard they had no stables she took him up to her room. Romeo got to spend the night with Bardot. Romeo was in and Connery was out. It was the ultimate male fantasy.
Two decades or so later and Brigitte had thrown away her movie career and dedicated herself full-time to animals. So when another donkey knocked on her door some time in the 80s he must have thought he was in for 5-star treatment. His owner had to dash off somewhere for a couple of weeks and so he left him chez Brigitte, on her farm, for a holiday. When he returned his donkey had become a shadow of his former self. The man took Bardot to court. In her defence, she claimed that the donkey, feeling his oats, had been putting himself about among the ladies a little bit too much, so she had done what was called for in the circumstances: she castrated him.
I won't say that it was more painful for me than it was for Not-Romeo, but the news came as a major blow. The castration of the donkey was an allegory of what had happened to our hopes and dreams. She had given up being Don Juan and taken to being the Marquis de Sade instead. The emasculating cut turned my original presupposition on its head: not only did Bardot not desire me, but she was going out of her way to eradicate and cancel out all desire.
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Thus there are two contradictory readings of these photographs. In the first, Bardot is the incarnation of desire. She is pure affirmation, she is love (shortlived, of course). Not just Beauty but Truth.
In the second she is nothing but negation. She is rejection and refusal and rebuke. Everything else turns out to be just a simulacrum of desire. A script.
In one reading she is Yes; in the other, she is No. She is both On and Off.
Is she pleasure or pain? These photographs will not resolve the question for you. We look, we see, and we do not know. Yes/No, On/Off. What Brigitte Bardot embodies so emphatically in these pictures is precisely this state of not-knowing. Of radical uncertainty. You cannot read the mind of this young woman, you have no access to her private thoughts. If you meet her, when you meet her, what will be her reaction: love, hate, indifference? Even afterwards, it is possible that you still won't know.
These photographs are a zen koan: enlightenment consists in trying ' but also not trying ' to resolve an impossible conundrum. They remind me of the question Bardot herself asks, so unanswerably, at the beginning of Godard's Le Mépris: 'Which do you prefer, my breasts or my nipples?'
Photos©Bob Schalkwijk
