Truffaut the Critic: On Vadim's And God Created Woman (1956)

"And God Created Woman is a sensitive and intelligent film with no trace of vulgarity. It's a film that belongs to this generation: simultaneously amoral (rejecting the current moral system but proposing no other) and puritanical (conscious of it amorality and disturbed by it). Far from being trivial, it is revealing and completely honest...only the young will side with Vadim, because he sees thing as they do...obviously the film isn't perfect...but what is good is really good. Brigitte Bardot is magnificent; for the first time she is completely herself...And God Created Woman, an intimate film, a notebook film, reveals a new French director who is more personal than Boisrond, Boissol, Carbonnaux, and Joffe-and just as gifted."

-Excerpts from Truffaut's 1957 review. The full piece can be found in his The Films in My Life-

My Favorite Closing Shots: Louis Malle's A Very Private Affair and Damage

Under a Precise and Colorful Sky: The Saga of Pierre Koralnik's Anna

Serge Gainsbourg was professionally riding high at the dawn of 1965. Announcing quite boldly that he was ready to throw himself into “rock…real rock”, the already popular French singer, songwriter and actor set in motion a new direction that would reach its stunning peak, just over five years later, with the release of the mind-blowing Histoire de Melody Nelson album. Gainsbourg had a ways to go though and the two-minute 45 that began the explosion was the delightfully catchy “Poupee De Cire”, a Eurovision winner sang by the absolutely scrumptious and always captivating France Gall.







While the first France Gall collaboration in 1965 was a small triumph for Gainsbourg, he found himself growing more and more frustrated as the year progressed. He had never been more popular with the public, but his personal life was scattering as his marriage to then wife Beatrice was disintegrating. By the end of the year, France’s most popular songwriter was an exhausted artist who needed a break from marriage and, briefly, the public eye. He found that respite at the apartment of a friend named Pierre Koralnik, a young Swiss filmmaker who offered his pad to Gainsbourg so the struggling artist could effectively get refueled.




Author Sylvie Simmon’s notes in her entertaining Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes that tension arose between the two young roommates fairly quickly, when Koralnik criticized Gainsbourg for offering up too much mediocre material to singers not worth the vinyl they were being pressed on. Gainsbourg had reasons though for his prolific songwriting period between 1966 and 1967, which was namely to open “up the record market” to release “whatever he liked.” The gamble paid off and, by 1967, Serge was ready to begin one of the most remarkable periods for any popular musician ever, a five year span that would see him creating some of the most astonishing and influential albums of the era (first with Brigitte Bardot and then with Jane Birkin). Before Gainsbourg was entranced and then shattered by Bardot he wrote the music for, and acted in, the spectacular television film Anna, a visionary work Koralnik had crafted with the help of writer Jean-Loup Dabadie.





A propulsive pop-art masterpiece featuring eye popping color and one of the best soundtracks of the sixties, Anna (1967) is a miracle of a film, and the fact that it was originally made for television and not the big screen makes it one of the most head scratching curiosities of the sixties.




Originally planned as a vehicle for red-hot British singing sensation Marianne Faithfull, Anna was granted its perfect heroine when Jean-Luc Godard’s muse and then wife Anna Karina came on board. Joining the luminous and haunting Karina was the wonderful and handsome Jean-Claude Brialy starring as Serge, a hip young ad exec who becomes positively entanced by a photograph of a mysterious young woman who he becomes obsessed with tracking down.



With New Wave icons Karina and Brialy aboard, Anna stands as one of the most bizarre chapters in a delirious period of filmmaking that would see the original directors of the famed French movement scattering in dramatic, and often antagonist, ways. Koralnik was not part of the New Wave, but there is no denying its influence on Anna, specifically Godard’s stunning 1961 colorful masterpiece A Woman is a Woman, a musical satire which Karina had also graced with her delightful presence.




Anna is a wonderfully hard production to pin down. Savage satire mixed with a sweet love story and frenzied comedy crossed with surrealistic fantasy, Anna in its own way is one of the most confrontational films of the period. More than anything else though it is a brilliant musical, filled with some of the most exciting songs of Serge Gainsbourg’s career. It is also a tribute to the great beauty of Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy, as well as being both a homage and critique to our fascination with such perfection in pop culture.







While either Karina and Brialy feature in almost every shot in Anna, a couple of other welcome faces pop up as well, including Marianne Faithfull who was able to make time in her incredibly frantic schedule to film one of Anna's most memorable scenes. French singing sensation Eddy Mitchell also appears in a crowded and dizzying party sequence.







Perhaps the real star of Anna, outside of Gainsbourg’s score and Karina’s face, is the dazzling photography of cinematographer Willy Kurant. The talented Kurant, who has worked with everyone from Jean-Luc Godard to Pink Floyd, is at the top of his game here and Anna is absolutely astounding to look at. Kurant’s photography is so vivid, and the costume designs of Lison Bonfils and Anne Frantz are so spectacular to look at, that they almost overwhelm the fact that Koralnik’s film is at its heart a rather biting satiric look at the often shallow and materialistic place the world was becoming in 1967. Who’s kidding who though, as Anna is also a firm celebration of that world, a contradiction that makes it all the more entrancing all these years later.







With its extraordinarily bizarre dance sequences, catchy and altogether tremendous Gainsbourg score and a haunting final sequence that foreshadows Bob Fosse’s ferociously autobiographical All That Jazz by well over a decade, Anna is impossible to take your eyes off of. It is, simply put, one of the most perfectly realized and rendered works of the sixties.







The imaginative Koralnik has mostly remained in television throughout his career, but he has a couple of features to his credit including the masterful and intense Cannabis (1970), one of the most memorable films the unstoppable team of Gainsbourg and Birkin made together. His greatest work, Anna, would be a hit on French television (and in some French theaters) but one has to wonder what its impact would have been on the worldwide big-screen. Serge Gainsbourg barely took a moment to ponder on its possible impact to the viewers who saw it that summer of 67, as all things Bardot soon entranced him. Anna probably became a fading memory fairly quickly for those involved but it remains a captivating experience, and one that seems specific to the sixties, as something this alive and colorful would have been all but impossible at any other point in time.

Bardot, Boisrond and Come Dance With Me

Among the most fascinating films of Brigitte Bardot’s legendary career, 1959's Voulez-vous danser avec moi is an ambitious if ultimately flawed attempt from director Michel Boisrond that still stands as one of Bardot’s most valuable works. Working from a Kelley Roos novel entitled The Blonde Died Dancing, Boisrond and his screenwriters bravely attempted to capitalize on Bardot's already proven comedic skills by mixing them with elements of both drama and mystery. The result would be mostly ignored at the time but, in hindsight, Come Dance With Me is clearly one of Bardot’s most interesting films and one of the most undervalued studio-produced French productions of the fifties.





Brigitte Bardot and Michel Boisrond were far from strangers by the time they made Come Dance with Me in 1959. Boisrond, a former assistant to both Jean Cocteau and Rene Clair, had already directed Bardot twice as the fifties gave way to the sixties, first on the Vadim scripted That Naughty Girl in 1956 and then on 1957’s The Parisian. The two had a good working relationship and Bardot was comfortable with Boisrond, a fact that would make her work with him all the more memorable. Come Dance With Me is far and away the best of their first three films together, a fitfully funny and captivating mystery that doesn’t make a wrong move until its frustrating final act.





Telling the story of a young bride named Virginie (Bardot) who is helping her husband Herve clear his name of the murder of a dancer who had been blackmailing him, Come Dance With Me is a competent and unfussy film driven by Bardot’s graceful and intelligent performance. Joining Bardot for Boisrond’s often surprising romp is Henri Vidal as her troubled husband, Dawn Addams as the conniving and doomed dancer Anita Flores and Serge Gainsbourg in a small but memorable role as the smooth-talking Leon.





Come Dance With Me was an important film for both Boisrond and Bardot and the director wanted to do something special for his favorite leading lady. He commented at the time that while their first two films together had been, “pure comedy” he, “wanted a change” with Come Dance With Me, in that he finally wanted to make a, “suspense film with some comedy touches.” To his credit Boisrond was one of the first directors, outside of Vadim, that knew that Bardot possessed something very special as an actress. He would say that she was one of just a few who could truly, “combine humour and drama”, and Bardot certainly doesn’t disappoint in Come Dance With Me.



While it might be hard to see what much of the controversy was about, Come Dance With captured the wrath of the censors outside of France. Boisrond’s film is indeed quite a daring little production for 1959, especially considering it was studio guided. While Addams topless scene (performed by a possible body-double) and the films final section in a gay nightclub must have raised many eyebrows in the late fifties, Come Dance With Me’s most daring moment comes in a tremendous scene between Bardot and Vidal, in which BB is in bed with the handsome man clearly admiring and enjoying his body and the promised sex they will soon be having. In a period where the idea that women might enjoy and want sex as much as men was still shocking to many, Bardot’s obvious delight at Vidal's body is still a refreshing and captivating moment. It’s also an interesting way for Boisrond to turn the table on an audience who were there for the most part to admire Bardot’s famous figure.




Come Dance With Me is also briefly trailblazing in the way that it presents homosexuality on the screen during a moving sequence between Bardot and Philippe Nicaud, who admits that while he finds her attractive he is only interested in men. Sadly Boisrond’s seeming acceptance of Nicaud as a positive character in the film is destroyed by the unfortunate final act that stereotypes his character as something perverse and corrupt. The films final denouncement is such a shame as for awhile Come Dance With Me seems downright revolutionary, but it finally turns out to be very much a product of its prejudiced time.




Problems aside, Come Dance With Me is for the most part quite a wonderful production. Directed well by the always competent Boisrond and featuring the wonderfully colorful photography of Robert Lefebvre, Come Dance With Me is the kind of studio-driven production most of the New Wave would have rejected but it’s aged extremely well.






Despite all of the qualities present on screen in Come Dance With Me, the film was marked by tragedy. The original choice for the character of Anita Flores, Italian actress Sylvia Lopez, had tragically died of leukaemia just before shooting began and Henri Vidal passed away shortly after the film wrapped. Making matters even worse was the fact that Bardot, who had shot an amazing two-dozen films in just over a five-year period, was completely exhausted and extremely depressed. Come Dance With Me, despite having an effortless feel about it, was an extremely difficult production for all involved so it’s a wonder that, for the most part, it came together so beautifully.




Come Dance With Me wasn’t one of Bardot’s bigger hits of the fifties with audiences, most of whom probably didn’t know whether to take it as a comedy or a thriller. Critical opinion was mixed with The Monthly Film Bulletin praising it as a, “colorful policier boasting a few neat twists and surprises”, while the ever-irritated Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times that it was a, “shoddy piece of mystery.” Also, in what has to be one of the most idiotic statements ever printed, Esquire critic Dwight MacDonald said of the breathtaking Bardot, “her face has been reduced to the sexual essentials and is, objectively considered, by now rather terrifying.”






Typical dubious critical reaction aside, Bardot’s performance in Come Dance With Me is enlightening, potent and finally poetic. Moving from scene to scene with the grace of an obvious dancer, and the charisma of someone near alien, Bardot is as captivating to watch today as she was over fifty years ago when Come Dance With Me was released. The symbolic end to the first part of her career, Bardot would follow Boisrond’s splendid mystery up with her stunning role in Clouzot’s The Truth, and within just a few years would leave all of cinema spellbound with her turn in Godard’s Contempt. She would only work with Michel Boisrond, who never stopped working up till his death in 2002, on the relatively obscure anthology film Famous Love Affairs in 1961. While not one of Bardot’s more well known directors Boisrond was one of the most important, as he was one of the first to see the vibrant poetry underneath the obvious sex.