VIVA MARIA (Louis Malle, 1965) is the only film I’ve been able to see from The Garden’s Cinema JEANNE MOREAU SEASON, and what bliss it was: buoyant, witty, cuttingly anti-clerical. The audience leaned middle-aged/ elderly and laughed out loud throughout. Conceived as a subversion of the male buddy film and inspired by Burt Lancaster and Gary Cooper in VERA CRUZ. Brigitte Bardot and Jeanne Moreau are showgirls making a living strip-teasing through the colonies and end up leading a revolution that succeeds in liberating San Miguel, a fictional country. Bardot plays the daughter of an Irish revolutionary and is an expert in anything to do with gun-powder. Moreau had been a legitimate actress and mines the classics for speeches declaimed to inspire the masses. Bardot is particularly charming in this kind of farce. She reminds me of Cher in her TV series days: She’s no Carole Lombard but she’s game, up for anything, and extremely charming with it. This light- as-air musical farce is backed up by some heavy-weight talents: producer Oscar Dancingers (VIRIDIANA), Jean-Claude Carrière (who wrote so many Buñuel classics such as THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE; THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE), the great Henri Decoin as dop, Pierre Cardin did the clothes, even Volker Schlöndorff is in the credits as an assistant. It’s the kind of film in which George Hamilton is perfectly passable as a revolutionary; Moreau and Bardot become worshipped by the masses as two virgin Marys and clerical torture devices fall apart mid-way because they haven’t been used since the Inquisition. The slogans of the era crop up everywhere and there’s something delightful about Bardot’s warning that ‘property is theft’. Indeed, it was all delightful and, of course, banned in Texas for the sex and the anti-clericalism.
