Brigitte Bardot

Cette semaine* at Lingua Franca we debuted our brand new Club de Culture classes for our more advanced students.

Each term, we’ll focus on a different aspect of French culture and for Term 1 we’ve chosen le cinéma*.

The courses run over ten weeks and we devote each lesson to a certain acteur ou actrice* and their most iconic film.

Spanning the period just before the arrival of La Nouvelle Vague* all the way up to the present day, we kicked off week one with Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s 1956 film Et Dieu…créa la femme*, which marked his directorial debut.

With a wafer-thin script and some comedically bad fight scenes, the film nonetheless is credited with introducing le sex-symbol* Brigitte Bardot to the film-going public. An indomitable free spirit, we see her topless, shoeless, braless, pantless and even legless…but never helpless. It’s BB who holds all the power for the majority of the film, until, with a couple of violent slaps to the face, her young husband brings her to heel in what makes for an anti-climactic and uncomfortable ending.

The release of the film coincided with the beginning of the sexual revolution and eerily mirrors the love story between Vadim and his starlet wife, Bardot, which scandalised her conservative parents.

À mon avis*, Et Dieu…créa la femme still merits a watch, if only to marvel at Bardot’s unbridled sexual allure and to reassure oneself that, in the words of one of our students “les temps ont bien changé!*”

Interest piqued? You can watch the entire film ici*.

*This week | *the cinema | *actor or actress | *The New Wave | *And God…Created Woman | *the sex symbol | *In my opinion | *times have definitely changed