Brigitte Bardot was an erotic symbol, a feminist icon and a woman who scandalized the bourgeoisie. But apart from that, there were many other things. Among them, the object of philosophical reflection at the end of the 1950s when Simone de Beauvoir wrote in “Les … “Lolita” syndrome that the actress embodies a mutation of the female imagination. It represented sex without guilt and the pleasure of a body without moral restrictions, according to Beauvoir, who noted that it did not seduce, but simply existed.
Marguerite Duras also underlined the break with the traditional model of woman implied by Bardot’s behavior, placing it in an existentialism without essence, a pure act of desire without transcendence. Jean Cocteau noted that Brigitte was the expression of a magnetism which attracted idolaters in an age without gods.
Louis Malle claimed that she had three personalities: the physical one, that of an actress and the erotic myth, the source of her problems. It was not in vain that she attempted suicide at least four times, the same number of husbands she married. She was undoubtedly an idol, as Trintignant and Gainsbourg, two of her illustrious lovers, discovered. Dylan, platonically in love, composed a song inspired by her.
Godard, with whom Bardot worked in “Contempt,” said the actress created two problems: making him wear her skirt below the knees and cutting back her lush bun in her hair, two things he refused to do.
An erotic icon of my adolescence in Spain where censorship operated and nudity was prohibited, the film “And God Created Woman” by Roger Vadim, her first husband, had to wait until 1971 to be released in our country, fifteen years after its filming. Perhaps because in the first sequence he appears naked sunbathing on a terrace. I remember her with Claudia Cardinale on the Paseo del Espolón in Burgos in 1970, where they went to shoot a B movie.
Sartre saw in her a philosophical and cultural event when she went from a movie star to a body converted into freedom. It was the materialization of his concept of “being-in-itself”, someone who exists without consciousness, without the possibility of change and without cracks, with the naturalness of a stone. In other words, a being without essence, a pure existence which is exhausted in the mirror of desire.
Beyond her political ideas close to Le Pen, her love of animals, her innate rebellion and her contempt for appearances, or perhaps because of all of this, Bardot was much more than an actress and an erotic symbol. It was an intellectual challenge and a philosophical conundrum. A woman who made us dream and whose disappearance creates an irreparable void. She said that beauty is a form of intelligence and that is why it will survive as long as anyone watches her films.
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