Happiness is a burden plus AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (77)

I know that many of you think that my blog has suffered as of late because of swamped down with this new life I'm building down here and I'm just making paltry excuses as to why I can't watch Criterion films and thus can't write about them for you. To a great extent, this is very true, and I appreciate your derisive comments you judgmental assholes.

On the other hand I'm facing a bit of a problem. I'm a bit of cynic. A sort of part time pessimist who derives a lot of my humor from a sort of good-hearted need to jokingly criticize things. That's how I've always been and in a lot of ways, it's directly influenced my writing and my subject matter. Thus, for 100 posts or so before I moved to SF, I happily berated a number of subjects that strayed through my life, never fearing that I'd ever run out of material to lambast.

And then I moved to SF and I'm stunningly happy here. Not to say I wasn't happy in Sea-town, but I'd sort of nestled myself in to a cubby hole of contentment and from that vantage point I was able to see the frayed edges a bit better. Now, now I'm immersed in a new world, a lovely lady, a job I'm learning to enjoy, and seriously, no shitting you, I'm having a hard time writing. I've always scoffed at those Debbie Downers who claim that art is suffering and all that dried camel dung, but I'm a bundle of flavorless goo right now and everytime I sit down to write something, it's almost a struggle to find a target to aim at. I just dumbly smile at the screen, my eyes all glossed over and puppy dog and try to find an annoyance I have right now.

I know, pity me, I'm fucking happy. But seriously chums and chummettes, my work is losing its edge. I'm not crowing for change here, I'm just saying, your unimpressed stares are noted and I'm attempting to explain myself.

Maybe I'll go stand in the street and see if a car hits me, that might add a bit of flavor to this vanilla flavored weblog.

You know, I enjoy ogling a beautiful woman as much as the next completely-bereft-of-class individual and I certainly love a good French film as much as any self-respecting film dork, but there was something about And God Created Woman (77) that I couldn't get in to. That something was certainly Brigitte Bardot and her much-maligned slut character. The film follows Juliette (Brigitte Bardot), a beautiful woman on the tiny island of St. Tropez as she fucks and fights her way in to one shitty situation after another. I don't know if the term "home wrecker" existed before this film, but if not, here's your origin point dictionary writers. Juliette has no aim in life, no goal, she's just a stunning orphan (aside from this hideous coke bottle bangs) who wants attention, attention, and, well, more attention. She fixates on a family of ship building brothers and all but screws them to dissolution. For good reason, Bardot's Juliette reminded me of a brand of female I've known many times in my life, and, as a good character should I guess, it sort of grossed me out. There was a time, long ago, when this sort of attention seeking lady would draw me in, and eventually spit me out, and watching a 1950s version writ large, did nothing but annoy me.

A bit of twisted history about the film: Brigitte Bardot, when this film was made, was 18 years old just like her character. She was also married to the director, Roger Vadim, and had been for, yikes, three entire years. Thus, Bardot was married when she was 15 and cast as a teenage strumpet only three years later, by her husband. Seemingly, this wasn't a huge stretch for the attractive Frenchie, but jesus, if that's doesn't blur the line between art and reality as much as anything, I don't know what does.

There is something about Juliette in the film that drew me in though, which is the way Vadim balances her character as riding this fine line between child and adult. She's almost a woman-child in the film, a little girl who, and I think the film marks her role as an orphan as the cause, she's never experienced a true childhood. Instead of seeking that childhood though, Juliette abandons it, and instead pushes to become a woman. In a scene in her room, she saunters about whispering to her bunny and her bird and her kitten and the audience can't help but wonder how this little girl got so damn screwed up.

Before I go, I just want to belittle my brother a bit: he claimed that the sex scene on the beach was one of the more erotic in memory, and Alex and I were waiting to see just how hot this scene might be. But it came and went, and I felt as if maybe the DVD skipped, because what I saw was short and not stimulating in the smallest. I chalk this up to my brother's misunderstanding of the term "erotic". Don't judge him, he was a later bloomer. Love you brother!

By the way, if you want to read a fantastic essay about this film, please, go HERE, Chuck Stephens is as good a film writer as any and this is a fantastic break down of the sexual phenomenon that was Brigitte Bardot.

Wednesday: The Bank Dick (78)

A visit with the police and a bad excuse as to why AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (77) has barely been watched.

Ask anyone who knows me at all, I'm not much of a driver. Brief history: failed my driver's test three times (could've easily been four if not for my father's failure to bring an insurance card), gave up on the whole driving thing for years and years and years, thanks to the kindness of a good friend drove illegally for two months before getting my license two days before I graduated ... from college.

Since then I've driven sporadically, usually with breaks of six or more months in between and hell, I've been pretty happy with it. Low gas-payments, a love of walking, and no run-ins with Johnny Law.

Until last night. The story of last night:

1. I accompanied Alex on one of her childcare jobs, a babysitting gig for two of the coolest people, let alone parents I've met in a while. Just fun-loving people with a fantastic child that couldn't have been more warm, open and inviting. We got there, martinis were drank (babysitting is always better with a few under your belt), Elmo Pasta was served. And then, there was a knock at the door. Drunken parents needed a ride to the theatah, they were late and Taylor Hicks and Grease were waiting.

2. This found me ten minutes later, cruising the city streets of SF (city driving, another thing I've never done) in a monstrous Chevy Avalanche with four extremely drunk women generally cursing, screaming, and having a blast of a good time. Of course all of these women have two minutes before the show starts, and I'm gunning this tank of a vehicle through the streets of a city I barely know. My passengers jump out, literally jump out, at their destination and I'm off, alone and in a city I know nothing about.

3. And I quickly realize I have no idea where I am. I'm in a huge downtown in an unfamiliar car and I'm completely lost and my only reaction is to pick up my cellphone and call Alex ... which it turns out is totally illegal in this wonky state and seconds later I find myself pulled to the curb with a mustached police officer asking for my license and registration (neither of which are in the car). All of a sudden I'm worried that my breath smells like booze, and then the heated seat cushion starts firing on all pistons and I'm sweaty and dealing with the police, and for whatever reason all I can think is, "this shit always happens to me ... and I wouldn't have it any other way."

Mr. Mustache left me with a nice little citation and court appearance. Hopefully my sheer charm and baffled ignorance will help me shirk what might just be a hefty fine.

I had an entire weekend to watch this movie, and try I did, but due to an inability to stay awake during movies after consuming any amount of alcohol, and the fact that I'm rippling with excitement about all the shit I want to do in this city with Alex, I didn't finish it. Hell, I barely made it to the five minute mark on my first try, and ably bungled my second attempt to watch the film as well.

Thus, hopefully, I'll be able to get through it tonight and have something to say manyana.

I'd say sorry, but I'm not.

Tuesday: And God Created Woman (77)

My brother, Justin Sanders on AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (77)

I'd like to introduce my older and less-good looking sibling, one Justin Sanders, who's become obsessed with French films in the last few months and begged, even pleaded with me to let him review And God Created Woman (77). He's unctuously persuasive, so after a few hours of his weasel-y pleads, I gave in.

Thus, Justin Sanders everyone:

Howdy devoted readers of the Criterion Quest!

Special guest blogger Justin here, comin' at you from sunny Los Angeles, CA. I'm on the "Arty '60s French Dude" beat here at the Quest, as I am a great fan of those guys' steadfast commitment to introverted surrealism, and to showing Brigitte Bardot's ass whenever possible.

I also happen to be Noah's older brother. There are some benefits to being closely related by blood to the blog's administrator. One is that I can share fun stories from Noah's past that he for some reason refuses to relate himself, perhaps to keep himself shrouded in his signature cape of aloof mystery. This elusive scribe of the online realm won't tell you, for instance, that when he was seven, he was the victim of a snowball barrage in the backyard courtesy of myself and my friend Bobby. Oh how we pelted him, until he fled screaming towards the pine trees, hands waving at the air as if fighting off a swarm of bees. Upon reaching the vicinity of tree #1, a big ol' bushy mother, he slipped on something buried in the snow with such force, momentum actually carried him on his back beneath the tree's thick branches and out of sight, as if an invisible toboggan had carted him off to a secret underground world. There was a brief silence, and then he emerged, covered with snow and pine needles, in a frenzy of helpless rage, to which we naturally responded by howling with laughter. As he passed us on his way back into the house to cry to mommy, the mystery of what he'd slipped on became solved: A perfect line of smeared dog shit ran from the back of his collar all the way down to his waistline.

Oh, the times we had. But I digress. You've come today to learn about Roger Vadim's lustful classic, And God Created Woman (77).

The first thing I want to say about this film is at first I thought it was directed by an American, as the moniker "Roger," to me, seems as American a name as Maddox, Zahara, or Pax. Turns out it derives from the French, and is thus likely pronounced "Roh - szhare" or something equally entrancing.

Secondly, Brigitte Bardot, like Hamlet or The Iliad, is timeless. She is timelessly hot. In 2,000 years, when the prevalence of machines and robots have caused our muscles to atrophy and we have become scarily thin and flimsy like the alien humanoids generally thought to be populating UFOs, we will watch ancient footage of her curvacious performances and still become intensely aroused. I have recently moved to LA, and subsequently have been separated from my girlfriend Sarah by many hundreds of miles. I won't go into details, but as a result, And God Created Woman (77) was particularly pleasant and frustrating to watch for me, in alternating doses.

I like these old French films because they're unconcerned with riveting plots or purposeful narrative flow. They linger, they take their time, and they don't worry about tying everything up in a nice, tidy bow. This quality extends from the extreme weirdness of Godot's Alphaville (25) and Week-end to films like this one, which is pretty straightforward, yet eventfully uneventful. Bardot plays Juliette, a pouty, luscious 18-year-old beauty (she's really stretching here) who drives every man she encounters crazy with lust. All the men in the movie want her, and all the women loathe and mistrust her, which seems to be a pretty accurate depiction of hot women's lives in general.

Juliette is a sexually energized orphan living with foster parents in a small oceanside town, where she gets into it with a family of three brothers who run a humble little boat repair business. She lusts after the older, brooding brother, Antoine, but winds up marrying the younger, more innocent brother Michel, not because she loves him, but to avoid getting shipped off to the orphanage by her guardians, who have grown tired of her tawdry ways. When Antoine, who is away most of the time, returns home permanently to negotiate a deal with a local developer who wishes to buy out the family business, a spark re-ignites between him and her, and trouble ensues.

This film made waves upon its release in 1957, and it's easy to see why. My modern, entirely corrupted, desensitized brain found Bardot so sexy it nearly hurt; I can't imagine what the conservative movie-going public must have made of her more than a half-century ago. There must have been riots in the streets. People's heads must have literally exploded, spraying gobs of brain matter and bloody hair and skull fragments in every direction. In the very first scene, for crying out loud, Bardot enters the screen naked, the camera moving tenderly over her maddening curves, driving the imagination wild with what lies just out of view. Bardot's performance never goes deeper than steady sensual pout mode, but Vadim, as great directors do, uses this persona well. Juliette lives to tempt men, and the movie's drama stems from her struggle to fight her true essence while in the thick of an unwanted marriage. We know she doesn't want to be there. She knows she doesn't want to be there, and it's only a matter of time before she cracks and the shit hits the fan.

There's a famous dance number in And God Created Woman (77) in which Juliette gets drunk and gets down with some musicians in the bar, dancing provocatively on the table in a slit skirt that leaves little to the imagination. And while this scene is nice, my personal favorite was the one where she stole one of the brothers' boats and took it out on the sea, where it promptly caught fire. Older brother Antoine heroically swims out to rescue her, and the exhausted, sand-covered interaction that ensues has to be one of the most erotic moments ever filmed.

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Thanks a lot Pervert Sanders. You always know how to creep out everyone. Justin writes a pretty great blog about his recent move to LA and his attempts to become a thirty year old Hollywood star called Parade of Delusions, which I highly recommend.