Brigitte Bardot

Of Brigitte Bardot's eight catalogue entries, one is Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, from 1963. Tim Lucas, writing for the archive, says that film lovers outside France came to know her exactly through such out-of-the-way work, remembering her by a handful of oddities rather than by the main body of her filmography. Looking at a five-film collection, he describes a change spread over thirteen years: she begins as a young dancer and comedy player, willing and able, and turns into the face of grave romantic dramas wrestling with the question of free love. In the collection's last film she is thirty-four and five films from retirement; for Lucas she stands there like a guest actor in her own film. The screenwriter Howard Rodman's assessment, relayed in the same collection, says the greatest thing she left the world was not her films but her being able to carry a complete ease in her own skin as a woman.