Voulez-vous danser avec moi?

Brigitte Bardot lights up the screen (while keeping her threads on mostly) as a wife who plans to clear her husband's name while working at a dance studio..and she can really mambo. Very complicated plot, but well-paced. Hits some night spots which few films did at the time (cross-dressing) with overall decent acting and beautiful color.

A 6 out of 10. Best performance = BB. The guy who played BB's husband (the dentist) died right after this. He was married to Michele Morgan, I believe. Brigitte is sexy, intelligent, fun, dilligent, and focused in this surprising little gem (without being art). Dawn Addams is an added treat. The DVD copy I watched was clear as a bell which many of Ms. Bardot's film transfers are not. Seek it out for an interesting and fun surprise.

Brigitte Bardot was so completely feminine, playful, beautiful, and witty, she couldn't miss connecting with the male sector of any movie-going audience. And the women must have hated her, or at least envied her to tears.

Bardot's face is so luminous, focusing upon it is more stimulating than seeing close-up, revealing body shots of her contemporaries such as Eckberg and Lollobrigida. She could take a mediocre, or in this case, convoluted plot, and save a film which would have been a dud with just about any other female star.

The film is fast-paced, and suspenseful, in so far as the futility of trying to guess the culprit's identity, prior to the odds and ends being tied up neatly, in the end. And it far surpasses Bardot's collaboration with director Michel Boisrond, in "Mme. Pigalle," produced three years earlier. That one is filled with artifice and "mannerisms." such as fake auto rides, background landscape fakery, lip-synch singing, fake piano playing, and the stereotypical bumbling, "moronic cops" syndrome, so prevalent in films of the time. This film contains no artifice, or editing "tricks," whatsoever, and while it lacks for substance, it is entertaining, and the Bardot charisma at this most appealing stage of her life, stays with one, long after the curtain rings down.

Henri Vidal, in his final role before his untimely death at age 40, is well-cast, as Bardot's husband who is being blackmailed by femme fatale Dawn Addams, herself a red-headed stunner who exits the film much too soon to suit the male voyeur contingent.

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"Voulez-vous danser avec moi?" intends to be a light-minded humoristic thriller. As a matter of fact, it is very easy to realize "who done it", and the humor of the script is rather poor. Moreover in the plot one finds several flaws, too evident even for a movie with no pretension of likelihood.

Well, the preceding remarks have no relevance at all. Indeed, here we have a twenty-five-years-old Brigitte Bardot, folks! In Italy "Voulez-vous danser avec moi?" was entitled "Sexy Girl", a coarse and totally unsuited choice, we all agree about it... but... but in the movie Brigitte IS a sexy girl, you can bet your head on it. The film is just a long (and very welcome) promotion of her earthquake-like sex-appeal: among uncountable instances, look at her dancing...

After all, it is interesting to see a movie like "Voulez-vous danser avec moi?" to realize why, despite the low quality of many films featuring BB at the beginning of her career, people fought to get tickets to see Brigitte on the screen. And when she showed herself in flesh... according to BB's auto-biography, there was an explosion of riots, in France and in Italy and in Spain. See this movie and you will easily trust this statement of the French screen-legend.

A due final remark: also Dawn Addams gives a relevant contribution of beauty and charm to the bliss of the audience. All this considered, 90 minutes to view this movie are not wasted at all.

The murder mystery plot is pretty limp, but Bardot is at her ripest and performs a joyous mambo. The gay subplot would have been unthinkable in a Hollywood film of the time; here the treatment is relatively casual and benign. The title song is a finger-snapping delight; how could it have escaped Bobby Darin's attention?

This film begins with Brigitte Bardot falling in love with a dentist (Henri Vidal) and they soon marry. Soon after, he is seduced by a lady and goes back to her apartment. He begins to undress her and stops himself--he can't allow himself to cheat on his bride. He immediately leaves--not knowing that she is a blackmailer and her lover was photographing them in some very compromising positions. This begs the audience to wonder if any man can be THAT stupid and self-destructive, as at the time, Bardot was probably the most beautiful woman in the world (and, yes, I know there ARE men who cheat on their loving wives all the time--even if it makes no sense).

Soon, the lady blackmailer shows up at the Dentist's office and demands money for the photos. A sane man would come clean to his wife right there and then, but this would also make for a VERY short film, so he agrees to meet her later at her dance studio. The poor husband plans on killing the woman but before he can, she's already dead--apparently she has created a lot of enemies! Brigitte arrives soon after him, as she'd overheard the two talking earlier and wondered what was happening between them. Both Bardot and her hubby flee to avoid the police.

Bardot believes her husband when he tells her what happened. However, someone saw him at the studio and the police have a good description of him. So, to save her dumb husband, Brigitte decides to go undercover--and goes to the dance studio to ask for a job. Perhaps someone there knows what happened or was responsible for the killing. And, as this is only about thirty minutes into the film, you can safely assume that SOMETHING will occur sooner or later! This part of the film seemed well-suited for Bardot, as she was an exceptional dancer in real life.

Where the film goes next is pleasant but there aren't too many surprises. Plus, while I like Bardot, this film seemed only okay--nothing special but also not bad in any particular way. The writing is decent, the acting just fine but apart from the role played by a gay transvestite, the rest of the film just seemed ordinary. Non-Bardot fans can skip this one--it's just among her best.

By the way, like many French films of the era, this one if pretty frank about sex and sexuality. You will see some nudity it's obviously quite different from the sort of fare coming out of Hollywood at the same time!