Bridget Bardot: A Tribute

Have you heard of the Eternal Feminine? It is a phrase in Goethe’s Faust and I had to check the German so as not to make a mistake: das Ewig-Weibliche. Wikipedia excerpts the passage so I’ll use its translation:

Everything transient
Is but a symbol;
The insufficient
Here finds fulfilment;
The indescribable
Here becomes deed;
The eternal-feminine
Draws us on high.

But it is the first line that I like: “Everything transient is but a symbol.” Here, Goethe was making it obvious that his literature threaded back to Plato. A woman is a mere woman, a symbol, transient. Transient because passing through: she will die. A symbol because she gestures at infinity, at eternity: in her intelligence, perhaps, or her grace, those subtle things, or in that magnificent, astonishing wholly unsubtle evidence of everything, in her beauty. Ultimately, we are told, in her soul.

And now Bardot has died. And she, perhaps more than anyone else, captured the eternal feminine. Yet she, too, was transient. I want to reflect on this a bit.

Bardot was famous when she was young. Why? Because her fame was simple and existential and manifest in transience: so the world could not wait for a thought or a saying or a book: it had to seize her now, in her beauty.

I have to say that when I looked at her photographs yesterday I saw how perhaps that first fame was a mistake: even that was a work in progress: for she was not at her most beautiful when she was young, but when she matured: say, between 1958 and 1968, when she was 23 to 33. This is when she achieved that astonishing cat face, almost with a streak of pug: that is to say, with that slight hint of ugliness which is the key, always has been, to true beauty, adorned with a stripe of character: that intrigue, that hint of mortality, that refusal of a mere model’s impassive marbled beauty. For Bardot was not a model, or a marble, but an actress: she was dynamic, and to work it was not enough to have beauty, she had to have a symbolically dynamic spirit. And this she had. In addition, she was petite, and had a fine figure: her body seemed a marvel of restraint. Plus, I should say, she was French: which, at least for the English, is the race of rare sexuality, the quintessence of sex: of caprice, of charm, of world-weariness, of doom, of je m’en fiche. There is a special place in the Anglo-Saxon heart for Binoche, Delpy, Beart, Deneuve, Moreau, etc, and, perhaps the original one, Sarah Bernhardt. But somehow Bardot seems to be the apex.

There is something else to say. We have the eternal feminine dynamic: and of course what has made us associate this with particular women is photography and, above all, cinema. This did not exist in the age of Bernhardt: so we have to use our imagination to suggest to us what she was like, or Eleanora Duse, or the two who delighted George Bernard Shaw, Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell. For a while, long ago, I believed in Shaw’s enthusiasm for Mrs Patrick Campbell, the great stage actress of Pinero plays: but all I found were reels from her slightly imbecile and heavy-throated antiquity. This is obviously not the case with actresses who came of age when there were cameras to record it. And the particular pathos of Bardot is that she is alive on film: so we can watch Le Mépris or whatever in exact colour and motion.

Last night I watched Shalako. This is a western film made in 1968. It happens to be the only Bardot film I have in my collection, since I went through a phase of watching every major western I could get my hands on. In 2010 I didn’t think it was much good, and gave it one star, also the comment: “Laughably bad. It has all the hollowness films risk as they approach the end of the code.“ Perhaps this was unfair, and last night I looked at it with a more tolerant eye, perhaps because I have not watched a western for a long time, also because I wanted to think about Bardot a bit.

For those of us of a certain age, our civilisation, such as it is, comes from war films and westerns. War films are about the wars between and across civilisation: about friend and enemy, where the enemy is sometimes Russia but originally Germany. Westerns are more anthropological since they are about the coming of law, and are studies of life on the margins of civilisation, where men are still heroes, acting outside the law, though perhaps for the sake of some higher law. Bardot was not often found in war films or westerns. But she ended up in Shalako. And in fact she was the longest lived of all the major actors:

• Sean Connery, everyone knows him, died in 2020
• Stephen Boyd, famous as Ben Hur’s rival, died in 1977
• Jack Hawkins, old crust, died in 1973
• Peter van Eyck, died in 1969
• Honor Blackman, Miss Moneypenny, died in 2020
• Woody Strode, John Wayne’s sidekick, died in 1994
• Eric Sykes, British comedy actor, died in 2012
• Alexander Knox, died in 1995
• Valerie French, died in 1990

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw in his tribute wrote: “As the 60s continued, Bardot did an awful lot of ropey films, although fans have a soft spot for Shalako, a somewhat bizarre western she did with Sean Connery, whose hairpiece she reportedly found disconcerting.”

He did not explain why Shalako is bizarre, unless it be the hairpiece, which is one of the least disconcerting things about the film. The reason is because it is unsubtle: has a cartoonish quality. For instance, Jack Hawkins, as Sir Charles, an Englishman who has joined a hunting party in America, loses his wife to a wild and crooked cowboy, and while everyone is fending off Indians, approaches Stephen Boyd, calls his name: whereupon Boyd shoots him on the turn and on the draw, but is shot in turn by Hawkins as he falls to the ground. “At last I did something right!” he says, dying. The whole thing is a bit like this: with simple Red Injun stuff combining awkwardly with the Upstairs Downstairs element of Eric Sykes saying the champagne is insufficiently chilled. The film opens with an explanatory script, explaining why Europeans were in America: and then we have shots of Connery getting on and off a horse: he is meant to be American, and is called Moses Zebulun Carlin (Bardot has a good laugh at that name), but is called ‘Shalako’ because the Indians thought he always brought rain. He is meant to be one of those resourceful bed-down-in-the-wild always-wears-brown sort of fellows: but should have been played by Steve McQueen and not Scots policeman Connery, who, as usual, doesn’t bother with a relevant accent. In the midst of all this is Bardot, a bold non sequitur. She is affianced to Peter van Eyck, a baron: who, since he is European, knows how to climb a mountain; but he stands aside for Connery: and the last shot of the film is, after the Indians have dispersed: Connery rides right, and the Europeans ride left, but we see Bardot’s horse ride over to Connery’s. Through all this Bardot is beautiful: irrelevantly beautiful, like a bit of eternal feminine brought in to weigh down this weightless film. Honor Blackman is attractive, and dishonourable: dies with stolen diamonds stuffed into her mouth by an Indian – a sort of 1960s class war commentary, I suppose – but she is part of the film, bad as it is, whereas Bardot is just there, untouchable: nothing happens to her, she just speaks a bit of English and one examines her for signs of frailty. She rides side saddle, wears black, shoots a wildcat, shoots a man, lets herself be kissed, is honourable: and catches the eye always. “One of her best films,” says the Telegraph obituary, absurdly. The film is not really bizarre: it is just poor, and sometimes interesting, and odd with the aristocratic Old World hunting party element clashing with the old boy’s own Cowboy ‘n’ Injun business of men shooting guns and falling off horses. Films around 1968 were at an odd juncture: they half wanted to be old Hollywood films, moral and wholesome, and they half wanted to be new age, post-Morricone films, cool and amoral.

The Guardian is a bit embarrassed about the fact that after a good beginning (beautiful actress) and dignified development (animal rights campaigner) she became a supporter of Le Pen and even married a National Front advisor. The Guardian  obituary:

“I don’t need to be beautiful now,” she said, although she had once believed that her identity would disintegrate when desire vanished from men’s gaze. “How ugly she looks,” said a bystander when she led an animal rights demo. “I’m not ugly, I’m Bardot,” she replied.

I once encountered an animals rights protest on the streets of Cambridge, and I was astonished at how angry everyone looked, completely distorting their faces: and making them seem far more vengeful and unhinged than the perpetuators of the cruelty they were objecting to. Perhaps that was the ugliness in question: refusing to meet Delon after he advertised fur, that sort of thing. But otherwise, the exchange between Bardot and bystander expresses the enigma of beauty: that it dies, and that someone known for beauty in a sense dies for everyone else, though not for herself, with their beauty. Shakespeare knew this: it is what the first Sonnets are about.

The obituary also uses the word ‘Bardolatry’, which is a bit odd, as it is the word Shaw invented to describe the adulation thrown at Shakespeare, the ‘Bard’. Surely Bardot’s version should be Bardotlatry?

Anyhow, there we go. She had her photograph taken with Picasso. She was admired by Simone de Beauvoir. She was famous when my parents were young. She is one of those grand names we have always known. She was not a feminist. She rightly maintained that feminists do not like men. She is a useful reminder that what was carefree and unconventional in the 1950s might be a bit reactionary nowadays. I doubt she had a happy life: there is probably a moral somewhere about the punishment, or punition, of early fame, especially the fame of youth and beauty, and how strange it must be to have been famous for 50 years after one retires – yes, she retired when she was 40.

Et voila, there was Bardot. Beautiful, the eternal feminine. Poor lass. Somehow she had to put up with Vadim, Godard, Gainsbourg, pawing at her and hold onto herself. She seems to have not done too badly.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote one of those musing pieces about Bardot, and a bit of it is touching.

She is temperamental, changeable and unpredictable, and though she retains the limpidity of childhood, she has also preserved its mystery. A strange little creature, all in all; and this image does not depart from the traditional myth of femininity. She appears as a force of nature, dangerous so long as she remains untamed, but it is up to the male to domesticate her. She is kind, she is good-hearted. In all her films she loves animals. If she ever makes anyone suffer, it is never deliberately.

Until today I never thought about the poetry of the names. Brigitte Bardot. Greta Garbo. Marilyn Monroe. Well, that was the 20th Century: that habit of pinning-up and pining; and everyone everywhere able to see prints of those fragmentary symbols of the eternal feminine: hopefully assisting us in our search for our own small fragment of it.

It is odd. We democratised the Cleopatrine. Certain bourgeois girls became great queens: but queens without title, and queens with nothing to do but seem. ‘Icons’ we call them, these ladies without piety. And, lacking substance, they remained shadows to us: and were driven into themselves, living like shadows (“I want to be alone” – for what?), to find some sort of substance: harder work than it is for those of us who have something to do, and who can get by without blocking the roads, causing a scene and dismaying and demoralising or deranging a multitude of men every time we walk down the street. I think Bardot probably did a better job of this than Garbo or Monroe.

Still, sobering. I am fairly sure I am not projecting anything on to her when I say that she sounds as if she sought something to believe in. That she was somewhat abused by men, and educated into allowing them to abuse her, and calling this liberty. And that, despite everything, she had some ethereal quality that conveys itself, anchorless, in image or fleeting moment on the screen – as if she had that quality of having come to earth originally when humans were virtuous to live with us but later wanted to leave when she discovered we were not – the quality that Goethe was writing about in Faust.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.