Don Juan 73

Or if Don Juan Were A Woman In Modern Paris, if you would, and played by Brigitte Bardot, for her ex-husband Roger Vadim. I am uncertain what, if anything, Vadim was attempting to say; the mythical womanizer does not seem to gain anything by making him a woman, except for making the point that women have sexual appetites too. By the time this came out, Vadim's saucy and risque attitudes, which had been revolutionary in the 1950s, had become commonplace, even a bit dated. The only remaining point is that women could be sexual predators, just as much as men. To which I say: okay.

Vadim uses a slightly bleached color pallette for this movie, indicating to me that there is a limit to the pleasures of the body. Everything palls, after a while, and satiety does not satisfy. Or perhaps I am just an old man whose understanding of the legend is a little too secure.

Just after this film and a small part in one other, top screen star Brigitte Bardot retired from films at age 39. Perhaps she was just tired of the life, perhaps she was rich enough and more money held little attraction or perhaps appearing in crap like this film just took the joy out of the life of an actress. I suspect all three are quite likely reasons for this retirement--and you'd think an actress like her could have gotten roles better than this bilge!

The film is, in many ways, like a porno film without much sex--with a plot that weak and silly. Bardot plays an impossible to believe and completely amoral woman who takes delight in sleeping around and eventually destroying men....or at least casting them aside and letting them destroy themselves. She goes from one conquest to another and there is absolutely no depth or story--just wigs, nice fashions and, occasionally, a boobie. All this is, supposedly, told to a priest to whom she is confessing--like the plot from a bad porno film!!! The dialog, story and acting are all crap and the film doesn't offer enough salacious content to justify wasting your time---even if you see it out of curiosity. Dull, stupid and a waste of a beautiful and very talented woman. I give this film a 1 because I cannot see how anyone could make sex or Bardot dull--but they did! Talk about a waste of talent!!

By the way, one of the reviewers was particularly harsh towards director Vadim for this and many other travesties. Based on his films that I have seen (such as this, the 'remake' of "And God Created Woman", "Barbarella" and others), this attack seems entirely justified.

To get it out of the way, I never believed that Roger Vadim created BB or vice versa. They were both products of a film era that needed urgently some sexual awakening with the difference that he was a not-so-hot writer-director while she was a force of nature waiting to unleash her power. And boy did she do it!

Almost two decades after "Et Dieu... créa la femme" (1956) and after trying for years to replicate its success with BB stand-ins (Jane Fonda, Annette Stroyberg, Rebecca De Mornay, etc.) Vadim reunited with Bardot for what must have seemed (to them) a terrific idea: BB, the eternal seducer as Don Juan, the seducer par excellence. BB playing a stud? Not on your life! Her part is of a female seducer who thinks she was Don Juan on a previous incarnation. Really.

I think all this Don Juan business is just an excuse to show some hanky panky between Bardot and Birkin since lesbian love scenes were very popular in the early 70s and Vadim gracefully obliged. After all, if he wanted to presume of remaining a cinema transgresseur, showing BB in a lesbian situation is not such a bad idea. However by 1973 Bardot was no longer BB, that half a child, half a woman that conquered the world. Mind you, her charm and personality was still there but her face showed the puffiness and lines of middle age in spite of being shot through filters and special lightning.

Maybe the Don Juan concept could have worked better ten or fifteen years before but, if you are a Bardot follower, you know she did something very similar in Julien Duvivier´s "La femme et le pantin" (1959) filmed in Spain. I say "similar" because the story, although based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs, owes a lot to Prosper Mérimée' s "Carmen", that gypsy dame who plays with men' s emotions, a part that seem designed for BB who was then at the top of her powers as the ultimate seductress. Who is Carmen but a female version of Don Juan?

In short this is a not-so-good-film that must be seen for several reasons. First of all because it marked the end of Bardot' s film career (she did another film in 1973 and that was it), also for the presence of two actors that are also true cinema legends, Maurice Ronet and Robert Hossein (both deserve better). Last but not least, some praise must go to the Eastmancolor cinematography by veteran cameraman Henri Decaë. The rest you can throw away, Vadim et all.

Brigitte Bardot stars here in her last film along with Jane Birkin, the other singer who recorded the Serge Gainesbourg hit, "Je t'aime". This film is worth seeing, as we see BB's and Vadim's evolution from "And God Created Woman" to this post-sixties over-the-top comedy-drama.

We get some great nude scenes with Brigitte and Jane, and BB's character Jeanne is someone fed up with men, so she resorts to seduce and destroy tactics. As in "And God Created Woman" she's pretty much playing herself, but with an exaggerated storyline of driving men to ruin, murder, and suicide. The campy ironic humor is there in such scenarios as seducing a priest as well as setting up a fake menage-a-trois to madden a bete homme. Also a scene with Robert Walker Jr. (Charlie X in Star Trek TOS) where the price she asks for making love is no less than his life, which he takes seriously. The ending is a multiple meaning one as BB saves a man who makes her "pay for her sins" (though he's unappreciative). I think the end hits home for Brigitte in real life saying in effect, "look you male-dominated world, you've made my life hell". And it's the last scene she ever did on film. Worth seeing for it's erotic quality (but what BB film isn't), the submarine home, the early '70s fashions, and the camp.

Some reviewers seem not to notice the golden irony that BB, who was ready to quit acting without needing a swansong, chose a vehicle, the value of which she could not fail to comprehend, in which men commit suicide after making love to BB. She is natural and resigned to the penultimate finale of her career. Maurice Ronet acquits himself perfectly as the torn antihero. He is the perfect foil to her underplayed and subtle excesses. This film didn't need any association with Don Juan to work more than adequately on several levels. Not only does it excel in irony but also in theatrical sarcasm with the 'God created woman' embroiled in a hellish inferno in a finale of post-modern design, her nemesis entombed in what might be an analogy for shifting sands. I feel that, in life, she was always lost, this belief reinforced when we exchanged pleasantries in Cannes in 1969.