The astounding success of Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman revolutionized the foreign film market and turned Brigitte Bardot into an international star. Bardot stars as Juliette, an 18-year-old orphan whose unbridled appetite for pleasure shakes up all of St. Tropez; her sweet but naïve husband Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant) endures beatings, insults, and mambo in his attempts to tame her wild ways. —The Criterion Collection
Originally a stage actor, and also a part-time journalist and screenwriter, Roger Vadim came to film as an assistant to movie director Marc Allegret, and subsequently married Allegret’s most well known discovery, Brigitte Bardot, whom he also starred with in numerous films of the 1950s. Vadim became internationally known for his 1956 debut film And God Created Woman, which trod new ground in eroticism during the 1950s, and also starred Bardot. His later films luxuriated in their lushness and decadence, a process that continued with Vadim’s subsequent marriage to Jane Fonda, who also became one of his most renowned leading ladies. However, since the late 1960s, with the general opening up of American films to more overtly sexual content, Vadim’s popularity and success outside of Europe have fallen off markedly, and an American remake of And God Created Woman (1988) provoked yawns as much as curiosity from critics and the public alike. Vadim and Fonda have since divorced… read more
The movie was okay, but seeing the way the camera loved BB was historical. She lathered female sexuality all over the screen as it hadn't been done yet. Oh sure, there had been beautiful women, sexy women, unclothed women, sexier scenes. But the camera absolutely loved her; every centimeter of skin, every curve, each teasing pout. She became the brass ring on the hetero male merry-go-round--a legend cha cha cha.
A superficial film on gender relationships. It does not explore the conflicts between monogamy and sexual desire on an intellectual level, and the acting is not interesting enough to convey enough… read review