Word: bardots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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French photographers may not be quite as notorious as Italy's pugnacious paparazzi, but they are no less unscrupulous about invading people's privacy. When they are not wading out into the Mediterranean to sneak pictures of Brigitte Bardot semi-nude on her private beach, they are risking their necks schussing down the ski slopes of the Alps on the track of the Aga Khan. In one typical operation they took a picture of a Parisian professor chatting with one of his students in a Left Bank bistro, then used it to illustrate an article attacking "old pigs...
...collaboration of Bardot and Moreau has evidently cost Malle a good deal of directorial control, and every inch of control sacrificed in Viva Maria! has blossomed into yards of artistic chaos...
...account for the anticlimax, where sequences build to such banal exchanges as: (Bardot) "If my father saw me in clothes like these!" (Moreau) "Hurry up! We're going to the dance!" Then the beginnings of an exit, such as you get on high-school stages when there's no room in the wings. It's clumsy, and unlike Malle. Some of these scenes might seem less vacuous to French ears deaf to the banal dialogue spoken in English. I suspect that one scene, where some Negro officials sit around sipping tea, is built almost entirely of phrases from English textbooks...
...spark came in 1956 when Roger Vadim, then a lowly assistant director, somehow wrangled his producer into backing a low-budget effort entitled And God Created Women starting Vadim's own wife, who happened to be Brigitte Bardot. The film's success encouraged normally conservative French producers to exploit the appeal of both unknown stars and directors, and France at that time harbored a huge backlog of just such talent...
...Joseph E. Levine approached Godard with an offer of one million dollars on the condition that the again shoot in cinemascope and color and that he include Brigitte Bardot. Godard accepted the offer and made Contempt, probably the most important artistic statement of our time, by turning all the devices and conventions of the modern cinema upon themselves in a devastating critique of social decay...