odd couple: and god created woman and hiroshima mon amour

I suppose I ought to contribute my entry to the Odd Couple marathon today (a segment for which we originally couldn’t think up a wittier title than Strange Math; suggestions still wanted), and I’ll cheat in order to do so with this afternoon’s Netflix double feature: And God Created Woman and Hiroshima Mon Amour. Ok, so these two movies aren’t an actual pair in any way. Could two 1950s French-language films be more different?

War of love (Woman) vs. love in war (Hiroshima). Color (Woman) vs. black and white (Hiroshima). Jane Fonda sex-romp Barbarella’s director/scumbag Roger Vadim (Woman) vs. widely worshiped French New Waver Alain Resnais (Hiroshima).

Both films, however, are deeply concerned with adultery, romantic past and somewhat indecisive — though sexual — women, and neither require today’s outlandishly forward nudity to communicate their sexuality. (Not coincidentally, both have been awarded the Criterion Collection treatment, and don’t you non-filmies overlook that as some small honor).

And God Created Woman, to be honest, is a rather underwhelming picture, more about teenage hormones and overdone sexual possession than any true gender statement. Brigette Bardot, she of the charcoaled eyes and busty blonde dimensions, plays Juliette, a just-turned teenager run (gasp!) promiscuous on sexual desire. Criterion’s Chuck Stephens gives a fair summary:

Juliette runs on instinct, spurning the advances of leering millionaire Carradine (Curd Jürgens), but lusting after a hulking cad named Antoine (Christian Marquand). When Antoine in turn spurns Juliette, she impulsively marries his sincere but rather naïve younger brother, Michel (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Eventually, Juliette will brave fire and sea, ecstasy and despair, and—as a result of her unquenchable desire—erupt into a kind of Mambo-inspired madness. But when Vadim first unveils her, we see her as the serpents do: naked in the garden. “There lies Brigitte,” Time magazine announced of the moment, forking its tongue, “stretched from end to end of the CinemaScope screen, bottoms up and bare as a censor’s eyeball.”

Indeed, her opening shot is a top-heavy side-view of her belly-down, sun-bathing silhouette. Kudos to Vadim for at least keeping her veiled — her sexuality (and missile-sized breasts) are all the more bursting for their confinement in taut cotton. Several gaping males variously attempt to rein in or conquest the willful young girl, but by the end of the picture she’s famously busting loose by dancing on tables to rumba beats:

Woman could have happily focused on a singular teenager whose instinctual sexual fetish created havoc around the males around her, but Vadim chose the highly generalized title of And God Created Woman as if to suggest a larger point about the typical nature of the so-called fairer sex, and this I have one very sharp bone to pick with. Woman’s handful of male admirers are at all times after control of this she-devil; her own sexuality proves, ultimately, an inconvenience to their individual plans. Vadim’s little fable, meant to showcase then-wife Bardot (and how), merely categorizes this so-called Woman (barely that, it is worth adding, as she has just turned 18 — and why are no other women in the film in any way either considered or even sexualized?) by a single attribute, thus reducing her power to that of being able to please.

Hiroshima, on the other hand, examines two independently married lovers, a Japanese man and French woman, who meet in Hiroshima and pursue a brief affair over discussion of their various WWII pasts. The woman’s is considerably painful, dealing with the German soldier lover of her youth whose identity brought her tremendous shame in her small French town. But really, it is Resnais’s own technique that is most on show throughout this New Wave forerunner, introducing the use of quick flashback to a fresh generation of filmmakers. This is a film about memory, not gender; sex seems but a way to bring people together in sharing their memories/pains/selves.

Neither of these lovers own each other — they both have loving spouses to attend to outside of their weekend affair. Sex here is simply a means of connection, whereas for Woman sex actually wrenches people apart. Perhaps their guiding atmospheres having something to do with it. For Bardot, sex merely seems like the most interesting thing to do to pass the time; thus does it become divisive as it spans a brotherhood to occupy itself. For Hiroshima’s couple, too, sex is bred of boredom — a husband with a wife out of town, a wife out of town from her husband. But they forge a new bond over their intimacy. Bardot simply breaks them with hers.

— Sloane

Additional reading:

Criterion Collection, Hiroshima: http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=196&eid=317&section=essay

Criterion Collection, Woman: http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=77&eid=87&section=essay