Version classiqueVersion mobile

Jouer l’actrice

 | 
Jean-Loup Bourget
, 
Françoise Zamour

Quatrième partie. Le personnage d’actrice, miroir tendu à la femme ?

Displacement and self-portraiture in Louis Malle’s Vie privée

Carolyn Reese

Texte intégral

  • 1 P. Billard, Louis Malle, le rebelle solitaire, 2003, p. 206.

1In Louis Malle’s 1962 Vie privée, Brigitte Bardot is placed into a fictional world where she plays a character, Jill, whose life closely resembles Bardot’s experiences as a celebrity. But the film, one of the few that Malle did not have total control over, developed a monstrous quality as its production mimicked the exaggerated life of Bardot. Fully financed by MGM and split between locations in Paris, Geneva, and Spoleto, Italy, the available versions of the film today include a poorly-dubbed American version and a French language version that includes untranslated English language newspaper montages. This post-cinematic production failure along with the film’s aesthetics take on a melodramatic quality that is representative of Bardot’s celebrity life. Bardot embodies herself as an actress and celebrity, one of France’s « monstres sacrés ». The end of the film veers from Bardot’s autobiography into fiction, as it cites the ending of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) – though with all the camera flashes one might recall Rear Window as well. I argue that this ending of Vie privée, which shows Bardot falling to her death off of an Italian rooftop, is also a form of self-portraiture for Bardot as the double-reality of Vertigo : the double that Kim Novak plays – the « real » Judy Barton, playing the fictional Madeleine Elster – is representative of Bardot playing herself, at once a myth and a person. Like the fictional characters in Vertigo, Bardot is resurrected time and again – both throughout the film and throughout her career. Vie privée was, in fact, supposed to be her last film. She announced that she was quitting the cinema shortly beforehand1. Clearly, this did not occur, but reading the citation of Vertigo into the film becomes a way to explain the complications of Bardot’s role as an actress, and her life which became an act itself.

Displacement and the Moving Image

2This film is a self-portraiture through displacement, or the movement from one context to another. In this movement, relics of the original person and place are present, but fragmented. To be sure, the origin point of the actress is already a constructed entity. But this self portrait that is Vie privée comes from a layering of fragments that themselves constitute an identity. For example, elements from Vertigo contribute to the persona of Brigitte Bardot. Vie privée references Vertigo, pairing Bardot with Vertigo’s enigmatic female lead played by Kim Novak. Further, in Vie privée Bardot plays the role of an actress, essentially acting herself. In addition to all this, elements from tabloid stories constitute her autobiographical identity, revising this identity even further as tabloids are notorious for their skewing of fact. Thus, through reading displacements of Bardot in Vie privée, we might see what it means to act an actress and what it means to perform an identity in general.

3Within Vie privée, Brigitte Bardot is multiply displaced. Displacement repositions Bardot from a documentary image to a nonfiction mythology as she moves from actress to character, and further as her presence transitions to a recognizable yet impressionistic image. She is first displaced in autobiographical format from Bardot to the fictional Jill and secondly displaced from Bardot the person to Bardot the representation, or image. The cinematic image demonstrates an extreme displacement of a space that exists without an anchored place. It is an image that is able to exist in multiple places at once, creating an infinite constructedness of how we consider Brigitte Bardot. This complex performativity creates a superimposition of displacement onto displacement, which in return bridges the gap between documentary and fiction, stardom and acting, melodrama and reality. It questions what it means to act.

4Cinema presents a mechanism in its mediation of the act, or the art of acting, falling between fiction and reality. In its displacement of Bardot, Malle’s film Vie privée allows for such boundaries to be conflated, confused, and then briefly stabilized through the act of hyperbolic representation. The cinematic act is a displacement that leaves Bardot at once representable and unrepresentable. The film is at once documentary and fiction. Its documentary value is the possibility of its production in which celebrity cites his or her-self. By concentrating on biographical details of Bardot’s life, Louis Malle folds the pleasure of recognition into the suspense of fiction, presenting Bardot’s life as an act, or rather a myth that reaches levels of Hitchcockian suspense, in all of its veritable facets.

Vie privée, Louis Malle, 1962

Vie privée, Louis Malle, 1962
  • 2 See G. Vincendeau, Brigitte Bardot, 2013 ; G. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 2008 ; V. Schwartz, It’s (...)

5While Ginette Vincendeau, Geneviève Sellier and Vanessa Schwartz, among others, have written on this film with regards to Brigitte Bardot and her stardom2, I discuss it here as it presents an abstract form of displacement in narrative and aesthetic structures of cinema. By abstract I mean that the actor is thrown from the concrete – her assumed self – to the abstract, or the idea of Brigitte Bardot rather than the concrete person. Brigitte Bardot’s acting takes on the form of an unstable boundary that permeates the concrete/abstract and documentary/ fiction divide. Further, « acting » results both from the movements of Bardot, but also from the aesthetic movements of Louis Malle’s eye. The film enacts an actress, in an image-portrait, always already twice framed.

The Autobiopic : Acting Oneself

  • 3 G. Vincendeau, Brigitte Bardot, p. 100.
  • 4 See, for example, F. Hart, « Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography, » 1970, p. 485.
  • 5 L. Malle, Malle on Malle, 1993, p. 34-36.

6Bardot’s embodiment of Jill is what Ginette Vincendeau calls an autobiopic, or « a film in which the hero/ine plays him/herself in a fictional film that retraces his/her life3. » Though theories of autobiography incorporate mimetic values4, cinematic autobiography enhances these values in the form’s inherent mimetic qualities that enunciate performativity. Unlike autobiography, the problem of intentionality in an actress’s autobiopic, or an auteur’s autobiopic like Fellini’s 8/ 12, is minimized because of the collaborative nature of the filmic medium. While an auteur, Louis Malle necessarily must work with the actress, not to mention with the MGM production studio and funders who back the project. Likewise, Bardot must work with a director, or at least a camera. Malle says that Vie privée « functions on a level where lyricism has little to do with reality5. » This perfectly describes the autobiographical nature of the film. The lyricism of autobiography takes it away from reality, towards a layered, fragmented symphony of self. It is also notable that the film’s male lead, Marcello Mastroianni, also stars in Federico Fellini’s autobiographical 8 1/2, which was shot just before Vie privée. In fact, Malle’s first choice for the male lead in Vie privée was actor and director Orson Welles, who declined Malle’s offer in a letter :

  • 6 Orson Welles to Louis Malle. 29 April 1961, folder MALLE 1261-B233, Bibliothèque du film, La Cinéma (...)

I do not see how I could have been pretending to be directing a play in your picture, while in reality I was at the festival [in Spoleto] only to act… Frankly, I am quite dubious about finding a sensible solution to this problem, but I should be most happy to hear that I’m wrong6.

7These relations that contribute to autobiographical filmmaking provide another layer of complexity and enigma of truth with regard to the film’s documentary value. While this essay focuses on Bardot, the replacement of Orson Welles with Marcello Mastroianni illustrates a curious case where a director refused to act as himself.

8Turning back to Bardot’s autobiographical act in Vie privée, her self-representation functions first on a basic level. The events in Bardot’s life, from the general harassment that comes with being a celebrity to the specific instances of being accosted in an elevator by a maid followed by a botched suicide attempt, are reimagined in the fictional Jill’s not-so-private life. In a review of the film for Le Figaro littéraire, Claude Mauriac wrote :

  • 7 Review reprinted in H. Chapier, Louis Malle, 1964, p. 159.

[C]e délire collectif dont Louis Malle nous donne tant d’images exactes nous semble faux parce que incompréhensible. Si ce n’était que cela, Brigitte Bardot, comment avions-nous pu être si nombreux à divaguer ainsi à son propos7 ?

9Was it only Brigitte Bardot who could play Brigitte Bardot ? For Malle, yes. Perhaps in Vadim’s imagined Barbarella (1968), her mythology lived on. However, Malle presents the idea that Bardot can only play Bardot. Could anyone else play the exhausted boredom as well as Brigitte Bardot ? One scene in Vie privée depicts women throughout Paris dressed like Bardot in attempts to imitate her look, though without much success. Later on, the fictional Jill’s mother dresses up as Bardot/Jill to throw the paparazzi off of her daughter’s trail. From the hair to the bronzed skin to the clothing (and lack thereof), the image of Brigitte Bardot is replicated, but always disappoints those searching for the « real » Bardot. If an actress who resembled Bardot played Bardot, would this film be possible ?

  • 8 Ibid.

10Claude Mauriac concludes his review of the film, « Tout est vrai dans cette autobiographie, sauf un infime décalage de temps qui fausse tout8. » However, if one reads the lessons Hitchcock teaches us with Vertigo into this film, it might just be possible to imagine that Louis Malle – perhaps unintentionally – reconstructed the figure of Brigitte Bardot through the intensive doubling that so closely resembles Kim Novak’s character(s) in Vertigo. Characters with an « s », which is to say, the fragmented persona of Brigitte Bardot. The truth of Brigitte Bardot’s life is revealed through this gap that displaces Bardot. She, the actress, departs from her life as a celebrity and arrives into the life of a celebrity, but one which allows for artistic license. This autobiography wills a suspension of disbelief, which is also to say that it has an element of fictional suspense because of the uncertainty of its truth value. Louis Malle and Brigitte Bardot must suspend belief of Brigitte Bardot’s life to recreate Brigitte Bardot’s life. What I am suggesting here is that what seems like documentary fact is a fiction, while the fictional qualities of the film become the most truthful re-telling of Bardot’s life at the time. The story is true because it is just that : a story. Because the stories of Bardot’s life were told over and over again, they necessarily become mutated into something imagined. They are recreated over and over again, veering more towards fiction than actuality. Many times this story of Bardot’s life tends towards suicide or death. However, if Bardot is able to re-enact these quasi-truths, perhaps the story, as it turns towards fiction, becomes more truthful than any fact. The aesthetics of the film of course create and problematize these fictional truths and truthful fictions. That is, the documentary value of the film is lost in the unreal celebrity of Brigitte Bardot. Instead, fictional truths – such as the pattern of her character that so closely resembles the women in Hitchcock’s Vertigo – teach us more about Brigitte Bardot than any documentary or biography.

  • 9 R. Neupert, « Red blood on white bread : Hitchcock, Chabrol, and French cinema, » in D. Boyd and R. (...)

11It is useful to look at a few instances where Vertigo might provide clues to Malle’s telling of Bardot’s story. Malle was of course reverent of Hitchcock’s films, and has said that Hitchcock was an influence on his 1958 Ascenseur pour l’échafaud9. I have not come across direct evidence that Hitchcock was an influence on Vie privée, but take liberty in drawing these conclusions because of this prior relational fact. The particular framing of Bardot’s fall from the rooftop juxtaposed against shots from Vertigo might convince you as well.

Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

Vie privée, Louis Malle, 1962

Vie privée, Louis Malle, 1962

12In Vertigo, Kim Novak plays a fictional character, Judy Barton, who is hired to play a woman, Madeleine, who resembles a mythologized, deceased character, Carlotta Valdes. Similarly, in Vie privée, Bardot plays a woman hired to play the image of herself, who is playing a fictional, mythologized celebrity – Jill. This fictional character might be Bardot, but Bardot as myth. Because Bardot’s life became an act in itself, it is difficult to separate « her » from her image. Bardot’s private life became Bardot’s public life. And the characters Bardot played on screen formed the image of Bardot off-screen. As she is killed off in various fictions, her facade, whether that is her character in Le Mépris (1963) or Jill, the famous actress in Vie privée, resembles the problem created by Kim Novak’s doubly displaced characters in Vertigo.

« Self-reflecting mirrors » : Bardot as object and myth

  • 10 Bellour’s argument is described by D. Linderman, « The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s « Vertigo », », (...)

13Raymond Bellour reads Vertigo as « a series of self-reflecting mirrors10. » This idea feeds into the myth and creation of Bardot’s autobiopic. While acting, she often looks at images of herself in mirrored surfaces. Though this is complicated even further as Bardot’s acting style, which derived from ballet and modeling rather than the theatre, is often described as natural,

  • 11 Vadim and Bardot quoted in S. de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome [first printed i (...)

« existing » rather than « acting », as Roger Vadim described it. Bardot herself described her role in Et Dieu créa la femme (Roger Vadim, 1956) as « exactly me When I’m in front of the camera, I’m simply myself11. »

14But what does being herself mean ? In comparing Vertigo and Bardot’s autobiopic, Vie privée, I take on the idea of double displacement, which reads Bardot as first a portrait painted by Louis Malle acting the character of Jill, then as Bardot playing this character, who is supposed to be the image or symbol of Bardot rather than the subject of Bardot. That is to say, the human subject Bardot plays the iconic object Bardot, who in turn plays a fictional « reality » of this object. Contrariwise, Malle attempts to make this iconic object « Bardot » a subject again. He tries to bring Bardot back down to earth and place her among the living. This is not unlike what Hitchcock did in upending the myth of both Carlotta Valdes and Madeleine Elster with the disclosure of the common Judy from small-town Kansas. I look at this intertwined, tangled structure in terms of framing, as described by Deborah Linderman in her essay on the mise-en-abîme of Vertigo :

  • 12 D. Linderman, « The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” », p. 57.

From this duplicative gesture, the text restages itself and its mise-en-abîme inasmuch as the fact of that construction presupposes a set of embedded, mutually reflecting and interanimating structures into which the characters’« psychologies » are enfolded. An abyssal textural structure is one in which an illusion of infinite regress is accomplished by the incorporation of an internal story into a larger diegetic pattern of which it is a mirror or « miniature ». The illusion results from the possibility of an unending metonymic series, one framed within the other, although in fact the very principle of the frame is eroded by the principle of incorporation : what is outside the frame is also inside it, the frame is contained by what it frames12.

  • 13 G. Vincendeau, Stars and Sstardom in French Cinema, 2000, p. 96.

15It is the breaking down of the frame, the instability of it that creates the possibility for each element existing on either side. Like the women in Vertigo, Bardot’s iconography and mythology are critically confused – perhaps not to herself, but to audiences, to men, and to women. Ginette Vincendeau writes that « Bardot the star is always superimposed on Bardot’s characters13. » But what does this mean when Bardot’s character is in fact Bardot ?

  • 14 Review reprinted in H. Chapier, Louis Malle, p. 155.
  • 15 Louis Malle himself refers to Vie privée as « Sirkian. » See Malle on Malle, p. 34.
  • 16 François Maurin, cited in G. Sellier, Masculine Singular, p. 204.

16Following Bardot’s displacement from Brigitte Bardot to her character Jill, I turn towards a second displacement : Bardot as representation or image. This might also be called Bardot as object rather than subject. Because she found herself on film, Bardot – whether seen as a human or a celebrated image – is in fact an object. At the very least, a filmic object. In a critique of the film, René Guyonnet wrote that « comme ses personnages, ses décors vivent14 ». I use this idea to look at Bardot as a painting, one that could fit into a melodramatic, Sirkian set15. Louis Malle paints a portrait of Bardot, but in a particular style, through impressionistic views, or, as one critic described the film, « a succession of glances16 ». These glances become mediated even further as Malle often frames Bardot first in the screen and secondly in a second frame, a door or a window. But Bardot is not only looked at. She too looks, returning the gaze upon a world that does not seem to fit her.

17Is there Bardot outside of the cinematic or does « Bardot » only refer to an image ? Today, the woman and her politics certainly differ from the image of Brigitte Bardot. But nobody else could take her place in historical iconography. The filmic depictions of her body, as it twirls through Malle’s film, mythologize and prove some of the last viable evidence of the cinematic Bardot. She is killed and killed again. Like James Dean, she is resurrected in her iconic mythology. But her displacement on film and her displacement from person to image mean that Bardot lives only on film even if she, the person, is still left standing. She is a mythology constituted of displaced fragments. The production of Brigitte Bardot comes into conflict with her existence as person. She is only successful in replicating herself to a degree, but this displacement of self with self defines both the film and her celebrity. It helps us to understand what it is to play an actress : it is a double displacement that throws the plot into an abîme or abyss that is recoverable only in chaos. The technical value of filmic mediation stabilizes the chaotic relationship of actress to actress as they are both played on film, demonstrating the peculiar dynamics of identity constitution.

Notes

1 P. Billard, Louis Malle, le rebelle solitaire, 2003, p. 206.

2 See G. Vincendeau, Brigitte Bardot, 2013 ; G. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 2008 ; V. Schwartz, It’s so French ! Hollywood, Paris, and the making of a cosmopolitan film culture, 2007.

3 G. Vincendeau, Brigitte Bardot, p. 100.

4 See, for example, F. Hart, « Notes for an Anatomy of Modern Autobiography, » 1970, p. 485.

5 L. Malle, Malle on Malle, 1993, p. 34-36.

6 Orson Welles to Louis Malle. 29 April 1961, folder MALLE 1261-B233, Bibliothèque du film, La Cinémathèque française, Paris.

7 Review reprinted in H. Chapier, Louis Malle, 1964, p. 159.

8 Ibid.

9 R. Neupert, « Red blood on white bread : Hitchcock, Chabrol, and French cinema, » in D. Boyd and R. Barton Palmer (ed.), After Hitchcock. Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality, 2006, p. 133.

10 Bellour’s argument is described by D. Linderman, « The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s « Vertigo », », 1991, p. 52.

11 Vadim and Bardot quoted in S. de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome [first printed in Esquire, 1959], p. 18.

12 D. Linderman, « The Mise-en-Abîme in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” », p. 57.

13 G. Vincendeau, Stars and Sstardom in French Cinema, 2000, p. 96.

14 Review reprinted in H. Chapier, Louis Malle, p. 155.

15 Louis Malle himself refers to Vie privée as « Sirkian. » See Malle on Malle, p. 34.

16 François Maurin, cited in G. Sellier, Masculine Singular, p. 204.

Table des illustrations

Titre Vie privée, Louis Malle, 1962
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/5060/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 23k
Titre Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/5060/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 18k
Titre Vie privée, Louis Malle, 1962
URL http://books.openedition.org/editionsulm/docannexe/image/5060/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 12k

Auteur

© Éditions Rue d’Ulm, 2017

Licence OpenEdition Books

Acheter

Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search