OH BARDOT

EVERLASTING IMPACT OF FRENCH FILM STAR

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Julia de Nunez stars as Brigitte Bardot in a six part streaming series on CBC Gem, Bardot (2023).

Victor Belmono plays Roger Vadim, the filmmaker who discovered Bardot and quickly fell in love with her before she became an international film icon during the sexual revolution.

Director Christopher Thompson starts the narrative when Bardot is still just Brigitte, a French teenager from a strict Catholic Parisian family learning to dance in ballet classes, so beautiful as to be cast on magazine covers as a 15 year old in 1950.

Bardot’s morally blind parents belong to one narrative that intertwines with the rest of the series about the pretty young daughter’s accelerating maturity.

Nunez delivers a good performance recreating the Bardot public image without over creating and relying on caricature. Bardot loves and cries and at times almost dies of a broken heart.

And as Bardot’s fame spreads, Nunez shows how the celebrity life gradually grinds the happy love bird into a more realistic, pragmatist, almost tired of all the drama the iconic character attracts.

Yvan Attal plays the producer who at times gets a bit too close to the set and finds a few personal entanglements amongst the egos and hot heads of the 1960s French film industry.

The narrative is simple enough: follow the sensational life of the femme fatal superstar along the timeline of her true to life events. This linear narrative keeps the plot rationally connected as Bardot finds love along the emotional rollercoaster changing her private life course every now and then by falling in love with a director, then an actor, and then a singer.

Thompson ends the series just when Bardot takes control of the chaos that seems to be following her around.

The French language script is better in English subtitles than poorly dubbed English on obviously French actors leading that liberal French life in public as celebrities.

Bardot, like the streaming series has intertwining narratives, falling from one love story to the next in real life, and falling from one love story to the next in film. The idea being that the sexual revolution had as much to do about sex as the transformative changes occurring in society had to do with gender emancipation and female liberation.

Bardot of course was a household name all over the world as one of the most beautiful people of the cultural revolution that began in the 1950s and also as a rather talented actor, and later as a natural activist, attracting all the media attention her name and presence at a protest would attract.

Bardot advocated for animal rights at a time of needed awareness about the obvious cruelty of humanity in the mass slaughter of whales and baby harp seals, donkeys, and stray dogs. Bardot established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation by auctioning off personal items.

The series transitions from one episode to the next as the love interests come and go. Belmondo does a good job as Bardot’s first husband maintaining a constant presence throughout all six episodes, heart broken but understanding and accepting the competing interests of sex, love, career and celebrity art.

The series is interesting enough as a time capsule from an important part of Parisian life when society did undergo a revolutionary change that had such momentum as to perhaps still be tumbling through many lives today.

This generation would not be this generation without Brigette Bardot.