Magnifique Dominique

Afternoon. The season is late autumn, the setting St.-Tropez. And the freaked-out French resort--resuming its identity as a peaceful fishing village after the summer crush of reckless, topless Beautiful People from four continents--seems precisely the right place for Dominique Sanda, la belle Dominique, to be talking about herself. Still a few months shy of her 21st birthday, Dominique is a serenely classic blonde with the electric New Sensibility throbbing in every pore. She is also on her way to becoming a legend as the result of just three pictures, which have inspired rapturous critics to compare her to Garbo, Dietrich and a Botticelli Renaissance angel.

It quickly becomes apparent that she commands attention without effort. Slumped in a blue lawn chair on the flagstone patio of a sand-colored stucco villa that sprawls in the hills overlooking St.-Tropez, Dominique wears a beige cable-knit sweater over tweed bell-bottoms and has her ash-blonde hair pinned back with exquisite indifference. She looks sensational. She and her lover, 45-year-old Christian Marquand, a former actor who turned film maker (and directed Candy), are the house guests of French director Roger Vadim, estranged husband of Jane Fonda and host, for the moment, to a dozen or more friends, relatives, film folk and sweet young things with daring decolletage.

Open and friendly yet subtly aloof from the others, who treat her with the deference due visiting royalty, Dominique pooh-poohs, all the nonsense about a new Dietrich. "It's nice to hear. They also say I am like Carole Lombard, but I want to be myself, Dominique. Who I really love and identify with are Baudelaire and Rimbaud, or Rousseau...or that English painter who works with acrylics. What's his name...Peter Blake."

Speaking of art pulls her attention back to a large woolen tapestry of her own design--a sunburst pattern woven in muted shades of gold, gray, beige and blue. She calmly picks up her needle and sets to work. "I love the sun," she says. "I have dreams about the sun. I'm attracted by warm colors, groovy things, contradictions. Like those Bedouins I once saw in Morocco, who wear their traditional costumes with blue-and-yellow plastic shoes. That I like." She would plainly rather discuss Bedouin couture than recap her life and career. Both began, in a sense, at the age of 15, when she sought to liberate herself from the no-nos of a convent education and her French bourgeois upbringing by plunging into a passionate love affair with a young man of 23. Their marriage lasted a year, says Dominique, adding, "It ended bitterly. Marriage was just my excuse. Soon I began to be photographed by everyone and made a lot of money. He made no money at all, because he didn't work. Mostly, I did not respect him."

The glamor of modeling soon palled, despite Vogue spreads and frequent junkets to Africa, Turkey, Jamaica, Israel, New York. "It was fine for a while, because I was searching for something, but fashion is a world of surfaces, horribly narcissistic. I was like a butterfly, liking people for a day or an hour. I stayed out every night, very late, trying everything...you know?" Assured that we know, she smiles the smile of a frolicsome princess who's been caught creeping home at dawn in servant girl's disguise.

Her first film role came at 17, when a friend suggested to veteran French director Robert Bresson that she would be perfectly cast as the heroine of Une Femme Douce, his adaptation of a Dostoievsky short story. Bresson got more than he bargained for. "He is really a terrible man, very egoistic," Dominique explains, "and he wants publicity only for himself. All my friends warned me that the actors in Bresson films just disappear and never do anything afterward. One man, they say--I don't remember his name--finished a film with Bresson, then committed suicide by jumping under a train. He wants actors depressed, deflated, until there is no emotion left in them. He is brilliant but cold." She shivers, then shrugs off the memory of endless retakes by recalling how she invited writers and photographers to the set and garnered reams of publicity in Paris. "Bresson was furious, of course. But I had nothing to lose, I was not yet an actress. I told him simply, 'Look, you have done many films, but this is my first, and I enjoy the experience very much. I intend to do other films in the future. So you see....'"

Bresson saw that he had a tigress by the tail and subsided. Dominique was next chosen to play opposite actor-director Maximilian Schell in First Love and chalked up another personal triumph, which prepared her for her memorable role with Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist. Playing the beautiful Lesbian wife of a leftist political leader, Dominique recalls, "was my best film experience. Difficult, because I had to let go of myself, express real emotion. The exhibitionism was hardest for me, like the ballroom scene where the other woman and I danced the tango."A little number, incidentally, that The New Yorker's tart, tough-minded critic Pauline Kael called "one of the most romantic screen dances since Rogers and Astaire."

Now she has three other completed movies on tap, including The Garden of the Finzi-Continis for Italy's venerable Vittorio De Sica. Antonioni wants her for a film called Technicamente Dolce (Technically Sweet). She is slated to co-star with Terence Stamp in a screen version of the English stage hit Abelard and Heloise. Bertolucci wanted her back to team with Marlon Brando in his new film, but the part went to Catherine Deneuve--because of a conflicting commitment to make a movie in Yugoslavia, though that project came to grief because Dominique happens to be several months pregnant. She and Christian never discuss marriage, she insists, though her parents broach the subject from time to time.

As the sunlight fades, Dominique moves inside the villa, fetches a tea tray and settles onto a green-plush love seat beneath an oil painting dominated by a reclining figure that appears to be a ravished nun. Elsewhere, the decor features elephant tusks and mounted trophies, souvenirs of the absentee owner's hunting safaris. "Horrible," Dominique mutters and obliterates her surroundings with a glance. Near the marble-and-mahogany mantelpiece a considerable distance away, the stereo is playing the Beatles' Abbey Road. Dominique nuzzles her kitten, an eight-week-old tailless Siamese named Ether ("There he was in bed with us one morning, and I decided we must find a name for the cat. The name we chose was Ether."). Pensive, she stands gazing at the delicate necklace of lights across the bay and peels off observations more or less at random.

Regarding directors, she knows exactly what she wants. Nothing but the best. "Antonioni, Antonioni. He is a marvelous, sensitive man and my very good friend. We have a certain rapport. I also adore Fellini. A genius, but with too much fireworks. That's not my way. I wouldn't know what to do with Fellini." She professes admiration for Bergman and Godard but wrinkles her nose at mention of Truffaut. "Personally, I don't even know him, but he is terrible for me. I can see what he is in his films. A little French bourgeois. I hate that. I have to identify, in a way, with a director's ideas--the script, the actors, the philosophy, it must all come together like this"--she carves a perfect oval in the air, her slim fingers meeting.

Among potential male co-stars, her first choice would be Brando. "A great actor and a very gentle man. He spent a week with us in the mountains. He is a close friend of Christian's, since Candy." She is equally intrigued by the thought of working with Jack Nicholson. "He is so different from me, but it might be interesting, no? I loved his performance in Five Easy Pieces, then I met him. He seems a little restless, insecure, like many Americans. I suppose because there is so much tension, so many conflicts in America."

Christian enters, dressed in his customary blue jeans and work jacket. He spends hours every day closeted with a female scenarist who is helping him write a script for Dominique--a story about a headstrong young girl in love with a considerably older man. "Yes, the heroine rather resembles Dominique," he admits, "a little bit schizophrenic." He contemplates Dominique as if trying to separate fact from fiction and remarks that she often seems quite old, which is true. According to her changing mood, or the mere shift of light on her profile, she might be a wistful child of 11 or a French diplomat's daughter doing an undergraduate year at Bennington or a wickedly worldly woman whose charms are indefinable, ageless. Marquand calls her a kind of witch. "She is very strong," he adds, "but you will notice she seldom raises her voice." Seldom needs to, for her voice has a sensual depth and resonance quite rare in promising film actresses of 20.

Dominique's view of Christian is no less romantic. One of her treasured possessions, temporarily out for repair, is an earring made from a large toenail he broke while playing tennis. "It's nice," (continued on page 212)Dominique(continued from page 90) she says, "because he suffered so much." Their relationship is "beautiful but difficult," since both were born under the sign of Pisces. "We always feel the same. When one of us is depressed, the other is, too." For the moment, they share a flat in Paris and rent a ramshackle old manor they are hoping to buy in the mountains of Haute-Provence, a half-day's drive from St.-Tropez. "It is not quite what we wanted; we were looking for a place with religious and mystical vibrations," says Dominique, though the gleam in her Mediterranean-blue eyes suggests that she will supply plentiful vibrations of her own.

Lunchtime the next day brings Vadim, barefoot, to a noisy table on the terrace set with rare roast beef, green salad and red Provencal wine. "This morning I was brooding about Dominique," he says lightly, "and I know her secret: She doesn't exist at all. It's a facade. She is entirely her own facade."

Dominique laughs and replies to the jest in French. She learned to speak English after three weeks of coaching for her role in First Love. "Later on, I was three months with an American boy," she explains, as if to recommend this method of improving language skills. Her accent is delightfully unobtrusive.

Off on afternoon errands in St.-Tropez, Dominique drives one of two Volkswagens she shares with Christian. The spare is parked at the airport in Nice, to facilitate their frequent arrivals and departures. She takes the wrong turn at a crossroads marked Plage de graniers and la Citadelle. "Ooohh, shit!" she groans and backs into a one-way street to ask a startled workman for directions.

Strolling along the quay lined with sidewalk cafés and souvenir shops, Dominique wears red boots, bells and a blue-cotton Chinese jacket. She adores loose "fluid" dresses, make-up, démodée shoes and anything made for her by Christian's mother, who used to sew for Chanel. But clothes matter little right here and now. She finds the village agreeable out of season. "In summer," she says, "St.-Tropez is a bordello. Look at those men...." Her scorn zeroes in on two cruising male tourists, sporting tight pocketless hip-huggers and shoulder bags. Unisex is not her style.

The nearly deserted bar of the Hotel Byblos, a luxurious cloister even by Riviera standards, encourages a more relaxed exchange. Dominique orders orange juice, having sworn off drinking ("I used to drink quite a lot") and smoking until after the baby comes. "I don't smoke at all," she remarks with meaningful emphasis, "and I won't take LSD, though I've been on trips five or six times. Fantastic. I will probably trip again, but it has to be only my risk. One cannot choose for a child. We each choose our own risks. You have to go as far as you can go, n'est-ce pas?"

Dominique removes her purply-tinted shades, apologizes for leaving the top two buttons of her slacks undone to accommodate a mostly imaginary bulge. She looks down into the hotel's semicircular swimming pool just outside and talks about water. Water as life. As symbolism. Though she shrugs off marriage ("Suppose in seven years I were with someone else or Christian were with someone else--what would it matter? We are together now."), except as a vague future, perhaps, some sort of incomprehensible legal convenience, the ritual of baptism stirs her soul. "Life begins in water, doesn't it? There is a doctor in Paris--I mean a real doctor, not a charlatan--who delivers your baby by candlelight in a quiet room, then washes it in a basin of water kept at body temperature, the same temperature as inside the womb. All very peaceful and natural, as it should be. I think I'm going to have a talk with that doctor...." Combing her hands through her hair, she shakes off any hint of seriousness and observes that she hasn't been to the Byblos since Mick Jagger's wedding. Another good friend of hers and Christian's. She giggles suddenly, begins to illustrate with gestures: "Jagger's wife was pregnant, so. Since he married, he has settled down, stopped smoking pot. I think he's become extremely bourgeois." There's that dirty word again.

Hours pass. The sun is setting as Dominique returns to a table at the portside Café Senequier, juggling several small paper bags full of hot roasted chestnuts. To accompany her on a shopping excursion is a remarkably painless chore. An elegant bauble in a boutique window may catch her eye, but she seldom wastes more than 30 seconds deciding between trés bon and trop cher. She is entranced by a pipe-and-tobacco shop, unequivocally the finest in St.-Tropez, and spies a stack of miniature wooden pipes, "marvelous for smoking hashish." The pipes cost only a few francs each and the gift of a pair--one for Christian--briefly transforms the dazzling sometime lotus-eater into a grateful child.

Evening finds Dominique back at the Villa Lou Solailles, where Vadim's weekend guests--evidently unaware that they are occupants of jet-set territory--seek post-prandial diversion in TV and Scrabble. A girl named Deborah from Houston is building a fire. Manitas de Plato is strumming on the stereo. Dominique, having changed into something topped by a deep-burgundy blouse that casually opens to her waist, presides over this mixed assemblage as if by God-given decree. Better yet, as if a fastidious film director had chosen her to star and had shrewdly prearranged the lights, dialog and camera angles in her favor.

Dominique moves across the room and brings a new group of supporting players into focus.

Dominique laughs, or trills a scrap of music, and the buxom brown-eyed gypsy at the far end of the table might as well be Apple Mary.

Dominique glides to the French windows, retrieves her kitten from the darkness outside and gently shakes him, scolding: "He slept all day? What does he know, hmm? He doesn't give a damn, Ether...do you? Do you?"

Ether may, in fact, know as much as anyone about the inner mysteries of Dominique, who calls her self-assurance a necessity, "because I don't believe in God or Christ or resurrection. I believe in the moment, not in what's going to be. One has to have it now."

She longs to play Desdemona on the screen to Christian's Othello, and Christian is convinced she could easily handle the part. "She has youth, classic beauty," he says. "Everything she feels is expressed instantly, the same in life as in front of the camera, so she appears to be a thoroughly trained actress. Then, of course, there are her eyes. When she is photographed, there's a kind of madness in her that's larger than life. That is very important."

Vadim, justly famous as a connoisseur of women in both private and professional spheres, sees other phenomena at work in Dominique: "She has the kind of total ego that creates monsters. I was only teasing about her facade. But by monsters I mean those who shut off everything outside themselves except precisely what they need--and still they seem to remain warm and vulnerable. Dominique, ah! She is just impossible enough to become one of the greatest French stars."

Not surprisingly, it is Dominique herself who has the last word. "My sensibility is not normal for my age," says she. "I have to change, grow up...I can easily be wounded. At heart I am a tragedienne. My God, if I were really to let myself go, it would be dangerous...."

Fade out on Dominique in close-up, whittling away the odds that Destiny will dare to contradict her.