The French have no problem reconciling sexual allure and noble, patriotic sentiments. That’s why, back in 1969, they selected Brigitte Bardot as the first celebrity face for Marianne, the personification of the French republic.
Historically, in paintings and sculptures, Marianne has been depicted as a classical style goddess, slim, young, beautiful and usually (partially) bare-breasted. She represents France’s idealized view of itself, the highest virtues of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity and a promise of the country’s lush bounty. In her own way, at the height of her career, so did Ms. Bardot.
She was an original 1950s bombshell, alongside Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe, with whom she seemed to have the most in common. Like Ms. Monroe, Ms. Bardot combined a certain innocence with a knockout figure and an erotic charge. And like her American counterpart, she was a bottle blond, which suggested a mixture of sun-kissed youth and savvy adult manipulation. Both women enhanced their doe-eyed gazes with grown-up, batwing false lashes.
But it’s their differences that are more interesting. Ms. Bardot, who died on Sunday at age 91, was presented as luscious and desirable in film after film. Recall, for example, the scene of her striding out of the Mediterranean, like Botticelli’s Venus, wearing a soaked white dress, in “And God Created Woman.” The camera regards her body with delectation, employing the “male gaze” perspective, as it’s called in feminist cinema studies. Ms. Monroe was usually given the same cinematic treatment — but, unlike Ms. Monroe, Ms. Bardot desired back.
Ms. Bardot’s characters, that is, wanted men as much as they wanted her. She never played coy, never seemed needy, or silly, or ditsy. She was carnal, direct, fully inhabiting her persona and sexuality. They called her a sex kitten but she was more of a panther.
Ms. Monroe, on the other hand, wore blond voluptuousness like a costume, winking at the audience from behind a mask. Her breathy, baby-talk routine was a joke she was in on, and one she was using for transactional, not erotic, purposes. “A kiss may be grand, but it won’t pay the rental,” she sang in “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” — a tongue-in-cheek paean to trading sex for jewels, about monetizing beauty before it faded.
There was nothing transactional about Ms. Bardot, no sense that this languid creature sought to cash in on her beauty. That languor also distinguished Ms. Bardot from Ms. Monroe.
Consider the hair: While Ms. Monroe’s was a construction, sculpted into those trademark waves with the swoop falling over one eye, Ms. Bardot wore a messy bun piled atop her head, hemmed usually with straight bangs or curls pointing toward her eyes. She looked permanently en route to or from bed — but always with an unobstructed gaze.
They moved differently, too. Ms. Monroe bounced and jiggled and sashayed, emphasizing fragmented sections of her body. Ms. Bardot, a trained ballerina, advanced in one fluid line. Her posture and her carriage were precise, erect and elegant (like those of her very unsiren-like contemporary, Audrey Hepburn). Ms. Bardot’s body was organically her own, on display, yes, but to attract pleasure, not ownership or domination. Even when she danced sexily on film, she balanced abandon with control.
Ms. Bardot retired from the cinema at 39 to pursue animal rights activism. She also became a divisive figure who espoused nationalistic and often racist ideology. In the infrequent glimpses of her in subsequent years, she seemed to be allowing her face and body to age naturally, without cosmetic intervention. In her 70s, 80s, and beyond, she looked like anyone would who had spent decades in the St. Tropez sun. But in perhaps a nostalgic nod to her heyday, she kept the trademark hairstyle, its carefree, untucked looseness now a parallel to her more relaxed face and body.
America has had no dearth of bombshell stars, but not one of them has been turned into an official patriotic symbol. We see such women as fun and distinct from patriotism. Our national symbols are sexless and unchanging. We don’t slip movie star faces into depictions of Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty (although she is originally French). We pretend that our popular culture is separate from the officialdom of government, even though they seem to be collapsing into each other now more than ever.
For a time, Brigitte Bardot incarnated the ultimate in Frenchness, the very essence of its people and identity (although in later life, she came to support a very narrow version of these concepts.) But the very notion that a country could fold desirous female sexuality so deeply into its symbols opens the question: What would it be like if America did likewise?
Rhonda Garelick writes the Face Forward column for The Times’s Style section. She is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Public Humanities at Hofstra University, where she is also the John Cranford Adams Distinguished Professor of Literature.
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