Vadim's "Pretty Maids"

Sitting here in California editing my first American film--Pretty Maids All in a Row--I find myself reflecting on my 12 preceding pictures and the women who have risen to stardom through them. Most of my films have been attacked or censored for their supposedly provocative content; but there has actually been less nudity in them than in many other films. Usually, however, their ambiance and their atmosphere are very erotic, even though people are dressed from neck to toe. If possible, I prefer to show an actress either completely naked or completely dressed; I always try to avoid that vulgar situation in which a woman is seen wearing only bra and panties. That's cheating the audience. Better to let the imagination work: An actress wearing a T-shirt with nothing underneath or moving under a sheet or outlined in shadow can be infinitely more suggestive.

Many times, I've discovered, viewers see my actresses as naked when they really aren't. And God Created Woman is a good example. Bardot was nude only in the opening sequences. Yet one of the French censors insisted that she was flagrantly naked in a later scene. We ran the film again to demonstrate that she was enveloped from neck to thigh in a turtleneck pullover. But the censor had honestly visualized her as undressed. That sort of mental striptease happens all the time. But it was not because of nudity that And God Created Woman was banned all over France. What the censors reacted to was my refusal to attach the ideas of sin and culpability to sex. At that time, it was understood that when you dealt with sex or nudity in motion pictures, there always had to be an excuse for it: The girl was a nymphomaniac or a whore or had been raped by her father as a child. And she always felt guilty. Now here was Bardot as a normal girl from a lower-middle-class family, a girl with a bright little mind and no problems. She was as free as the hippies of today. The censors felt that and didn't like it.

In one sequence, this girl has just gotten married. On the way home from church, a boy, who apparently has fucked her earlier, taunts her as a little whore. Her bridegroom, who is much smaller than the heckler, fights for her honor--but not terribly well. She takes her husband to her room to remove the blood from his face--and gets turned on by his demonstration of courage. She makes love to him while keeping the family waiting to begin the traditional wedding feast downstairs. After the lovemaking, she goes to the dinner table and, saying nothing to the family, picks up some food, puts it on a plate and returns to her husband. This was the scene that most irritated the French censors, because it attacked the base of society by making light of the tradition of marriage. In comparison with today's films, of course, And God Created Woman is suitable for children; it's even been shown on television. But at the time it was released in 1956, Woman was really a miracle. It was the film that changed the movie industry in France; it was the first French production to be a completely international success; and in two or three months after its release, Bardot was known throughout the world.

Brigitte was the first free, insolent international star, in the manner later to be adopted by the Beatles. She was also the first to be--physically as well as psychologically--half masculine, half feminine. If you look at Brigitte very closely, you will see that she has the ass of an adolescent male. The first time I met Brigitte, I was struck by her walk--like that of a princess, aristocratic and free at the same time. And completely spontaneous. There was a class and an elegance to her body. I love women who have their own way of moving their arms, of walking, sleeping, eating, washing. I was more impressed with this than sexually aroused by her in the beginning. For me, sex is very intellectual and takes time. I cannot walk along a street and see a woman and think: My God! I must have her.

But from the outset, I told Bardot she would become a star. She couldn't believe it. She was happy just being a ballet dancer. It's not generally known that Bardot was--and is--terribly insecure about her appearance. I like this sort of insecurity in a woman. I think it's very feminine. I imagine Marilyn Monroe was very insecure, and God knows she was feminine. I love women who are vulnerable in this way. Not someone like Raquel Welch; to me, she is a computerized star, not feminine at all. She conveys the idea that she can seduce anyone she wishes. That frightens me. She doesn't give you anything to look forward to. I would be completely impotent with such a woman.

I've often been compared to Svengali, the fictional mesmerist who set out to transform a simple bourgeois girl into a star--and succeeded. Although that seems terribly exaggerated, I have noticed that certain changes do occur in a woman when I'm living with her. You know, a woman sees herself in the eyes of a man, as if he were a mirror, and instinctively she does things (text continued on page 212) Vadim's "Pretty Maids" (continued from page 160) to create a favorable reaction. I'm not the type of man who will say: "Cut your hair" or "I want you blonde," but maybe unconsciously, like a painter, I have this vision of a certain woman inside me. Invariably, the girl I live with--through the mirror of my personality--takes on something of my image of the ideal woman. Perhaps what I brought most to Bardot was to help her liberate what has been just a potential.

Bardot and I are still good friends. But her career has not flourished since I left. In fact, it's been a disaster. She has such bad taste in choosing scripts. And she has surrounded herself with yes-men and yes-women, with no one strong enough to tell her not to make these nice little stupid, silly films. She's 36 years old and she can't play little-girl roles anymore. It's always sad when you see such a potential destroyed. I'm really anticipating her renaissance. I hope to help that occur by doing another film with her in the near future.

I never thought my second wife--Annette Stroyberg--had any future as an actress. She was happy just being a housewife. But it's very difficult for woman to stay home when her husband is involved all the time on the set or in a theater. She feels frustrated; after a while she wants to participate in the same sort of life. So I gave her a part in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, as a wife who goes insane after cheating on her husband. It was an ordinary sort to character, not a temperamental woman, and Annette was just fine in the role. But she meant much more to me--and had much more to offer--in our personal relationship. She had a good sense of humor; she could laugh with my friends; she had the anarchistic sort of mind than I like. She represented joy and beauty at a time when I felt that joy and beauty were dying in the world. I experienced the happiest moments of my life while I was living with Annette and my friends in the mountains and in southern France. But, like so much that it joyful and beautiful in life, it was not to last.

After Annette and I were divorced, I began living with Catherine Deneuve. Like Annette, Catherine didn't expect to become an actress; in fact, I was first attracted to her because she was the antithesis of a Hollywood product. She's very square, and she's not sexy in most people's terms. But she's openly and completely romantic, and in a world where romanticism is so often disguised, this is a very rare and special thing. When I say she's romantic, I mean she conveys a sense of purity and vulnerability. She's not really vulnerable, I found, but she gives that impression. In a sex film such as Belle de Jour, she portrays purity and romanticism destroyed, and this always has a fantastic impact on audiences.

Seven years ago, Catherine gave birth to our son, Christian. Having a child out of wedlock, especially in France, helped her career a great deal. French people love the underdog. I was attacked as a monster, but it was very good publicity for Catherine, because it created this image of the poor, pure girl, a sort of Gallic Little Orphan Annie. She didn't want to get married unless it would last forever; and since I knew, and she felt, that our relationship was not strong enough to last, she decided it was better to remain single. Ironically, many doctors had informed her that, physiologically, she couldn't have a child, so I sent her to a doctor for special treatment. I knew that she needed to have a baby. Many women find their own identity through some experiment in life. Some want to be actresses. Catherine wanted a child. With Jane Fonda, it was politics.

Thinking back about Jane, I recall having once told an interviewer that I would prefer jail to marriage with the typical American woman: someone who drives a car--and waits for the man to open the door. I hate the typical American woman's lack of imagination, her tendency to see everything as either black or white--and I can't stand her toughness. It's a man's society in the United States; you're respected when you're powerful, when you do that is tangible. In order to be respected by men, women must be just as tough. Consequently, there's a noticeable tendency for the American male to want to love a strong woman. Too many American men seek to perpetuate the mother image in their wives. They are fishing for the trouble they get when they marry.

Jane Fonda, of course, is not the typical American woman. When I met her, I was going through a period in which I though I would never again be in love--which is rather childish. I spent an evening with her at her agent's apartment. She had this huge brithday cake, because the agent thought it was Jane's birthday, but it was a mouth premature--November 21 instead of December 21. Though it was the wrong day, something happened that evening with Jane. Only once before in my life can I remember being so immediately attracted by a woman. The other occasion was when I was 18 and really fell in love for the first time--with a little girl of 16. More than Jane's face, I recall her attitude, the personal way she moved and her unusual intelligence.

We were married in 1965, and today it's very clear to me what I brought to Jane as an actress. She was not happy with her face or her body; so she underestimated her potential. She always thought that she would do best as a stage actress, in character parts. Never could she accept, on a conscious level, the idea that she could become a true star--someone who brings her personality to the screen. Anne Bancroft is a fantastic actress, but she is just that. She will go from one role to another without stealing the part. Because she was a star, Marilyn Monroe stole any part she played. So did Marlon Brando. Though he's a perfect actor, Sir Laurence Olivier will never take over a role and make it his own. Jane was really on the verge of becoming a star, of letting her personality explode and giving a trademark to any part she might play. What I gave her was the ability to let herself go, to respect herself, not only as an actress but also as a woman.

Jane was in search of her identity when we were together. Now that we are apart, she has found it in dedication to social and political causes. It's so rare for people to find exactly what it is they want to do--and then to get to do it. For this reason, I'm happy for her. But I'm a little frightened sometimes, because I don't know where it will end. On several levels, what she's doing is dangerous. But since she has chosen to be a revolutionary and accepts the risks, what am I to say? At this writing, we have not seen each other for months, and this has been difficult for me. All my life, I've needed someone close beside me, whether it be dog, wife, friend, mistress or child. I don't like to sleep alone.

In any event, Jane is a long way from being the average American housewife. Nor does she hold the typical American materialistic values, which I so abhor and which were dramatized just recently by one of the actresses in Pretty Maids All in a Row--a 19-year-old girl who had been semiofficially engaged for over a year. She arrived on the set one day with a big smile and showed me an engagement ring on her finger. "I finally got my ring," she told me. "And you know why? Yesterday, for the first time, I had this terrible fight with my boyfriend. I screamed at him and walked out. He called me later and said that he had my ring. I'd been trying to get it for six months." And I thought: My God! This marriage will really be terrible. Imagine the weakness of this boy. The first time the girl shows that she can really bite, he gives her a present, demonstrating that he's impressed. She'll do it again, of course, just to show that she's strong, when she wants to get something else.

Maybe I'm sounding unusually paternalistic, but in the special situation in which I found myself on Pretty Maids, I functioned as a sort of father to the performers. For the first time in many years, I wasn't living with the star of the film I was directing. (That was rather fortunate, since the star of this film is Rock Hudson.) So I had to work a little harder to create real intimacy on the set. Physical contact is an integral part of that sort of relationship, and throughout the film, I found myself unconsciously holding a hand or caressing the nape of a neck or patting a back. Before a scene begins, I always hug an actress, just to comfort her. Often I'll give her a fleeting kiss. With men, it's a little different. I'll put an arm around an actor's shoulder, instead. You must remember, of course, that I am French.

Actors and actresses, if they relate well to the director, give more of themselves. This was essential to the story of Pretty Maids, which is a black comedy about a high school athletic coach (Hudson) who seduces eight coeds and then murders three of them. In casting these eight roles, I tried to get girls like those you can find anyplace, but a little above average in sex appeal. I didn't want to fall into the trap of making a typical Hollywood movie, like a Dean Martin--or Frank Sinatra--type comedy featuring a covey of glamorous girls who are very beautiful but have no personality and are just like soap.

Despite the multiple murders, Pretty Maids is more satire than serious drama. The only apparent concern of the community regarding the murders is whether they'll force the cancellation of next week's football game. Our point: How little importance is placed on human lives today. From my own experience, I feel that sex and violence are very close. The most striking example I can recall is the time I lost my virginity. The girl was a little older than me and not very beautiful: sort of flat, with a big nose and dark hair. It was during the War, in June of 1944, and we were staying at a little farmhouse in Normandy for a couple of days. The first night, we cooked a very nice rabbit à la crème for dinner, and then repaired to the barn, where the farmer had offered us a place to sleep on the hay. Just before dawn, I made love for the first time in my life. Also for the first time, I came--which is logical. A few seconds after--perhaps a few seconds before--the walls began to shake. The roof was falling on us. The whole earth was trembling. The sound was incredible. It was like the creation or the end of the world. My first feeling was: My God! That's great! Have I done that? It turned out that this was the shelling from the D-day invasion. I must admit that it's never been the same since.

I also feel that sex and death are very close--a point that is emphatically made in Pretty Maids. During times of war, people make love more often than when everything is fine. In disorganized times, such as the present, when every nation is going through a fantastic metamorphosis, people are a little lost. The only thing that brings them back to earth, to a form of stability, is sex--the one level on which everyone talks the same language. The puritans of this world think that too much sex is a sign of decadence. I think it's a sign of something very healthy--that society is changing. When And God Created Woman was released in this country, sex still was taboo. Since then, something has happened to liberate people's minds. The American fear of sex is gradually diminishing--in motion pictures, in periodicals, on the stage, in private life. That's one of the most refreshing developments I've noticed on my current visit. By going through this experience, perhaps one day Americans will finally become adults.