This is a strange film that seemingly falls within the formula of a romantic
drama but inside that box it slowly became more perverse and odious leaving
a rancid taste in my mouth. Can it be a romance when the happy ending would
be becoming a mistress to a wealthy man that she has mocked and tormented.
Perhaps I think too much in traditional ways. This is French. Mistresses are
acceptable there. It was more the getting to it that felt cruel. By the end
you hate them both for different reasons. The film is based on the novel
La Femme et le pantin by Pierre Louÿs which was also the source for The
Devil is a Woman by Von Sternberg starring Dietrich and That Obscure Object
of Desire from Buñuel.
It begins in Seville during festival time with crowds in the streets and
music playing everywhere. A young woman is confidently making her way through
the milling people in her tight black dress and slightly wild blonde hair
running down past her neck. She is beautiful and knows it. Her beauty is her
trump card. She walks in on a man kissing a woman and looks at him with her
mouth implying I know you would rather be kissing me and walks away. This
is Eva. Played by Brigitte Bardot at the peak of her sexuality, beauty and
popularity. The man is smitten by her. He is Don Matteo (Antonio Vilar) a
wealthy married cattle rancher used to getting everything he wants. He initially
presumes she is a prostitute - and perhaps that would have been best for
him - he likes things with price tags.
She is in fact a virgin unknowing in the ways of love - she tells her friend
who loves her "Love sounds like an illness". But not unknown in the
way of men. She leads him on, then feints in another direction, makes him
think she is available for sex and being a mistress, then scorns him. He loves
her and so does her friend - she has to choose - in an American film we know
how that would go - but this is France and she instead begins a game of tormenting
Matteo, bringing him to his knees, humiliating him, bringing him down to
her level. His descent is horrifying.
Though Bardot is probably most famous for the two films And God Created
Women and Contempt, the vast majority of her films in France were frivolous
but charming light comedies with romance thrown in. She is the main reason
to watch them and this started off that way but director Julien Duvivier,
who is considered one of the classic French directors from the 1930s to the
1960s, takes it in another darker direction of obsession and cruelty that
no doubt was more to his liking.
