Brigitte Bardot, the series-diary of a scandal

This article is published in number 16 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 4, 2023

At the hospital, a beautiful young blonde in a white coat waddles down the corridor. Everyone turns around as she passes, but she doesn’t seem to notice. To receive her in an office there is a man in an overall, also a white one. Fear of being pregnant and she wants to be sure. She places a vial on the desk where she notices a female rabbit locked in a cage: «What will you do to her?». The doctor takes the animal in his hand: «We will inject her urine. If her ovaries become inflamed, it means she is pregnant.’

“But then you’ll keep her in a cage?”

«We don’t have a precise protocol… It’s the first time I’ve been asked this question».

A few days later you will receive confirmation of the pregnancy (bad news for her) and she’ll walk away with the sewn-up bunny.

This young and beautiful blonde is Brigitte Bardot and the scene is from Bardota biopic in six episodes of France Télévisions, soon on Canale 5, written and directed by Danièle Thompson and her son Christopher. “It may sound crazy, but that’s how they did pregnancy tests in the ’60s,” Thompson confirms. The director receives me on a clear winter afternoon in her office under the roofs of Paris. A gray cat scratches at the door. Around us there are many photos, souvenirs of half a century of life and work.

For five years, Danièle and Christopher Thompson have handled the BB myth like a stick of dynamite, with caution and delicacy. The scene of rabbitfor example, did not actually happen, but «it is historically accurate and allows us to make known Bardot’s attachment to animals» explains the director. Remain faithful, therefore, but without being afraid to invent. Taking a cue from a pile of documents, aware, she adds, “that Bardot is the ideal character for a fiction”.

The series tells the you start Of Brigitte Bardotfrom 1949, the year of his first cover on Elleat his suicide attempt in 1960, on his 26th birthday. It also tells the unimaginable cultural phenomenon which was BB in those years. Actress, singer, activist, but also a divinity on which the greatest writers have theorized, a timeless fashion icon. In short, a legend. A living legend. Alive to the point of being a little bulky, as when the series reminds us of his views on theimmigrationon theIslam and on gay rights (she was fined five times for incitement toracial hatred after done racist and homophobic comments). Complex personalities are certainly more interesting from a narrative point of view than those who do everything right, and here comes the purpose of the series: to find good reasons to forget the terrible logorrhea of “Prophetess of Saint-Tropez” and make us want to spend six hours watching, with pleasure, the Bardot phenomenon as it spreads through post-war French society.

“Bardot is a heroine, but not a saint», says Danièle Thompson. This is obvious, but it is better to say it, indeed, to reiterate it. Indeed, it is not easy to free oneself from the shadow of today’s Bardot to rediscover yesterday’s BB. Who could do it better than Danièle Thompson, one of the most influential women in French cinema, director of brilliant films (Christmas lunch, Partly by chance, partly by desire And Change queues), capable of dealing with irony and subtlety the most thorny social issues?

When in 2017 the producer Pascal Breton proposed her to write a series on Bardot, she accepted enthusiastically without thinking for a moment and immediately involved Christopher, her son and writing partner, in the adventure as co-writer.

He had known Bardot in person, but memories are not enough. Before tackling the script, Danièle Thompson did a real one investigation. She read thousands of pages (Bardot is a publishing phenomenon), consulted stacks of documents and as many photos and plunged into the France of the 50s and 60s.

“Everyone has a version of her in their imagination,” says Christopher, born in 1966. «There is the BB of the seal pups, that of Gainsbourg, of Clouzot or of Godard. I thought of her as a character at the center of a changing era, like the queen in The Crown».

The nightmare of motherhood

To fully understand the place that Brigitte Bardot held at the time, it is necessary to get rid of the image of the “recluse of the Madrague” (his famous Tropezian villa), macerated in hatred towards a society that no longer understands. We must also, and this is the credit of the series, to realize that she is not only the body fetish of male and manipulative directors (although it is undeniable that she is). Brigitte Bardot is much more, she is above all the actress of her own life.

For those who are too lazy even to consult Wikipedia: it was born in 1934 in a bourgeois family of the 16th arrondissement and grows in a strict Catholic atmosphere. About her Her photogenic sensuality, her dancer’s physique and her naive and provocative pout are immediately noticeable. Hers His first film appearance dates back to 1952 in Le trou normandbut it is Too many like it Of Roger Vadim to raise her to star level. Initially the film had modest success in France, but it was BB’s opportunity to discover Saint-Tropez and go blonde, two elements that would soon become an integral part of her personality. However, the producer Raoul Lévy was decisive, who had the happy intuition to release the film in the United States, where it scandal which he raised contributed to his success and to the birth of the BB myth. Now famous all over the world, every moment of her life is scrutinized by the tabloid press.

The hunt is open. Especially since on the set she falls in love with her partner, the young man Jean-Louis Trintignant. A love scheme that will be repeated several times…

There love life of Bardot is a bit of a dream paparazzibut also some screenwriters: guaranteed twists. The actress tends to focus on the men she meets, who are therefore famous. After Vadim, Trintignant and Gilbert Becaud, it will be Jacques Charrierthe young protagonist of Babette goes to warwith whom she falls in love and then becomes pregnant.

BB and Charrier are married in seven minutes, but she has no desire to become or be good mother. “She was like a cancer that had fed on me […]. When the nightmare reached its climax, I had to deal with the object of my life for the rest of my life misfortune», he wrote about the son Nicolas (who sued her) in BBreleased in 1996.

BB ends his career in 1973 to devote himself to animal rights. He opposes seal hunting, bullfighting, fur coats and vivisection. She was, indeed before anyone else, even one advocate for environmental causes, such as protecting the oceans and fighting pollution. But that’s another story.

Bardot sums up her situation thus: “My life looks like one big prison, pleasant, but still a prison”. Then, later, he adds this lucid observation: «I belong to everyone […]. It feels like no longer be free».

Filming desire

Change the lovers as if they were shirts, fascinates and disturbs, many feel threatened by thesexual explosion which it symbolizes. “She is a scandalous woman because it’s inadmissible not to want children, to choose your own partners, especially if you’re a woman who received a bourgeois upbringing», observes Danièle Thompson.

How to narrate and restore this destiny, in which the body is the protagonist, without transforming Bardot into a laboratory rabbit, into a woman-object? The Thompsons treasured a lesson from the critic and filmmaker Jean-Claude Biette (1942-2003), who in 1996 invented the notion of «Brigitte movie»: a work in which the predominant point of view is no longer that of a man but that of a woman. So they made one “Brigitte series”, where in the scenes, demurely called bed scenes, it is the boys who are naked, they are the objects of BB’s desire, and not the other way around. “We don’t celebrate the sex symbollet’s film his wish, his desire for love, for sex. And it’s moving,” explains Danièle.

Interpret without imitating

TO Julia de NunezFrench-Argentine actress hitherto unknown (but the series can change everything), has been given the daunting task of interpreting Brigitte Bardot.

There physical resemblance it’s not mind-blowing, but it has a rare quality, what acting pundits call “naturalness”. That’s what struck the Thompsons.

“We were looking for an actress, not a literal representation,” recalls Danièle Thompson. “We knew we wouldn’t imitate her, that we wouldn’t ask her to speak of her as Bardot. Above all, she should have embodied the character we had written ». No aping, so. There isn’t BB’s characteristic fluidity, not even the star’s animal corporality, despite the lessons of dance which he had to take for the scene of the mambo.

After the film ended, Julia abandoned her character by cutting her i hair. “At the end of filming it’s like I’ve lost that essence. I’ve come full circle, I’ve exorcised!», she exclaims, as if she were almost happy to have freed herself from the constant confrontation. She’s back in school and she envisions a career on the stage, where she’d like to perform in a play by playwright Georges Feydeau.

But what does the real Brigitte Bardot think of the series? She thinks ill of it, and that surprises no one. In December 2022, she told al Journal du Dimanche not to have been informed and to be contrary to the project in principle: «Nobody told me about this! But I don’t care: the only thing that matters is my real life, with me in it, and not some stupid biopic!».

Danièle Thompson seems to be looking for something on her phone, then changes her mind, as if she’s decided it’s not worth getting angry. “We talked, of course. She knows everything », she retorts. BB’s eternal need to provoke, no doubt.