A rather dull melodrama directed by Mario Bonnard, barely worth a look in except for the fact that it co-stars Brigitte Bardot and Lucia Bosé. It’s about two brothers, Austrian nobles, one is artistic and good and sides with Italy; the other is the kind who’d have his own brother killed and naturally sides with Germany. Bardot and Bosé, both extremely young and extremely beautiful, never appear together: a loss to cinema.

I’m here interested only in costuming, placement, attributions of character through visual associations. Bardot here is the good, sober, religious, child-loving, nursing and nurturing good woman, i.e the kind of role she’d stop playing as soon as she got any say. I here want to simply show a series of images, in chronological order, of how she’s presented in the film:

Brigitte Bardot, cast against what would later become her type, and exemplifying ‘eternal’ virtues :

Buttoned up and leading a choir

From choir to ball to marriage proposal

straight-laced, even in decolletée

braided, hatted, collared-up and married

With priest, baby, as a nurse, and near Jesus

In the country in peasant dress exemplifying the virtues of the countryside; in the middle, the virtuous and self-sacrificing mother; and, on the right, with priest, in lace, demonstrating forgiveness. She’s a Saint that Bardot.

Lucia Bosé: She’s a double-crossing spy in this one, in love with the man Bardot will marry and out for revenge. How can you tell she’s bad? She sings in a cabaret, she smokes, she’s draped in lots and lots of fur, adorned with feathers, and in public places women shouldn’t really be in, holding her own, looking beautiful, and smoking. It will all end in tears, but sad and glamorous ones. 

What fool of a director was Bonnard to not give these two a single scene together? Two very limited, very stereotyped, and very sexist views of womanhood. And yet, not without their pleasures.But for whom?

José Arroyo