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The fabled opening has the CinemaScope frame filled by the bare form of one Brigitte Bardot, behind on a clothesline is a white bed sheet like a blank movie screen—it might be a Boucher nude, except that it's Roger Vadim on the Côte d'Azur with Eastmancolor. (Hitchcock was just nearby for To Catch a Thief.) Far from the Madding Crowd serves the young heroine named Hardy, une fille du soleil perpetually luxuriating in sex and sand and music to the delectation and exasperation of local menfolk. At the crossroads astride a bicycle, her derriere magnetizes a busload of lechers: "See that girl? Her ass is a song." Three clods around a babe, a mock-Renoirian equation, the nerd (Jean-Louis Trintignant), the cad (Christian Marquand) and the tycoon (Curd Jürgens) encircle the barefoot coquette. Married life is the great challenge (she never looks more helplessly lewd or poignant than in her bridal gown), the meek shipyard worker meanwhile eats his spinach and prevails in this "story about the worm who loves a star." Basically a stack of gaudy French postcards splayed in raffish elongated compositions, a horizontal image that suddenly turns circular (the camera pans over to a concave mirror) and a seduction that moves from a flaming sailboat to behind a tree trunk on the beach. All of Vadim's Gauguin blues and reds however remain mere backdrop for his showcase of Bardot's kittenish rawness, a pouty blur of tousled hair sashaying around a jukebox, a blithe icon for Right Now pleasure since "all the future does is spoil the present." The finest studies are by Godard (Le Mépris) and Wesselmann (Great American Nude No. 94½). With Jane Marken, Jean Tissier, Isabelle Corey, Marie Glory, and Georges Poujouly.
--- Fernando F. Croce |