La vérité: Women on Trial

By the time Bardot made La vérité, “Bardomania” was in full swing and she was the most famous Frenchwoman on the planet, in huge demand in the film world. Every detail about her, from the trivial to the salacious, was public knowledge, but especially her numerous relationships with men. Clouzot agreed to make the film in 1959, during Bardot’s short, tumultuous marriage to actor Jacques Charrier (who tried to stop the project). In January 1960, the two had a son, Nicolas, whom she was ill prepared to look after, leading to accusations that she was a bad mother. The shoot, in the summer of that year, was tough. Clouzot was a notoriously exacting director, and sparks flew between him and his star, culminating in a much-reported episode: he slapped her to make her cry on-screen, and she slapped him back; he then deliberately trod on her bare toes. All this took place in the midst of her acrimonious split with Charrier, the publication in August—against her will—of her secretary Alain Carré’s sensational “memoirs” in the gossip newspaper France Dimanche, and the beginning of her affair with Frey, her La vérité costar. On her birthday, September 28, five weeks before the film’s release, shattered by the shoot and Frey’s absence due to military service, she attempted suicide—which less scrupulous film reviewers such as Claude Mauriac insinuated was a publicity stunt. In this context, it was not difficult for spectators to read Dominique’s rebellious nature, chaotic love life, and suicide attempts as being transparently about Bardot herself. The character’s styling as a fun-seeking, insolent young woman who loves dancing to rock and roll and going to the movies—preferring Brando to Bach—as opposed to Gilbert’s dedicated pursuit of a career in classical music, pointed also to the star’s personality.

Bardot dominates La vérité—its production, its story, its marketing (the original poster features a massive close-up of her face), and its reception. And, as noted, the flashbacks give us access to her character’s side of the narrative. Yet she is cast as a disruptive force that must be contained and eventually punished. Bardot’s eroticism, youth, and modernity—the core of her star persona—are attractive, positive qualities in films like And God Created Woman and popular comedies such as Une parisienne (1957). In La vérité, as in Love Is My Profession, they are presented in a darker, more ambivalent, and at times caricatural manner. By contrast with Annie and Gilbert, whose work ethics and straitlacedness perpetuate conservative values, Dominique and her friends in the cafés and hotels of the Latin Quarter are feckless, self-indulgent, and promiscuous. The modern accessories they favor—clothes, sports cars, and motorbikes—are uniformly portrayed in a negative light. Through Bardot, La vérité channels an almost paranoid vision of the young generation and its trappings, similar in this respect to Marcel Carné’s perspective on the youthful creatures in his Les tricheurs (1958), a film to which La vérité was frequently compared by reviewers. But the real target of the film is female sexuality and female power. 

Bardot’s sexual attractiveness invited both the hostility of the older generation (male and female) and the lustful gaze of men of all ages, a structure dutifully reproduced by the film, which alternates between Dominique’s condemnation in the dock and the spectacle of her sensational body, detailed, naked at times, by the camera in the flashbacks. This in itself is not unusual treatment for a sex symbol. But what made Bardot unique and transgressive was the fact that, on- and offscreen, she was seen to pursue her own desire rather than content herself with being the object of desire. In La vérité, her character has casual one-night stands and pursues Gilbert, once he has left her, as much as he once pursued her. In an article written forEsquire in August 1959, Simone de Beauvoir judiciously pinpointed this aspect of Bardot’s persona, in a much-quoted line: “In the game of love she is as much a hunter as she is a prey.” That this feature constitutes Dominique’s (and Bardot’s) “problem” is implied when the film makes a derogatory link between the character’s life of dissipation and the work of Beauvoir, as Dominique is said to have read The Mandarins, the author’s Prix Goncourt–winning novel of 1954. One of the book’s erotic passages is read out accusingly in court, to the point that Guérin asks, rhetorically, “Is Simone de Beauvoir on trial here?” The answer is yes. In a period of gender realignment after World War II and the German occupation, female emancipation was a sore topic, as illustrated by the heated debates caused by Beauvoir’s feminist treatise The Second Sex in 1949. More mundanely, we hear that Dominique was expelled from school for reading The Mandarins.

Beyond the famous Bardot and Beauvoir, other women too are on trial in La vérité. Clouzot, characteristically, conducted background research for the film, attending trials and investigating a number of female criminals, including the notorious Pauline Dubuisson. The young, beautiful Dubuisson was sentenced to life in prison in 1953 for murdering her lover, a fellow medical student, after he dropped her. While she never denied killing him, like Dominique she was adamant that it had been an accident and that she had intended to commit suicide (also like Dominique, she was found unconscious after attempting to gas herself). While Dubuisson had been branded as a murderous slut, her exceptionally harsh sentence provoked outrage, and she became a cause célèbre for a time. The publication in 2015 of Philippe Jaenada’s meticulously researched book on Dubuisson, La petite femelle, makes it possible to appreciate the importance of Dubuisson as a model for Dominique, despite differences in their trajectories. Jaenada shows how witnesses, the police, and the judiciary repeatedly bent facts and ignored or falsified evidence because of gender bias, just as we see happen in La vérité; essentially, they could not abide the “fact that she wouldn’t stay in her place as a woman, that is, be submissive, passive.” This echoes the notion that Guérin raises about Dominique in court when he says, “She led a free and easy life—granted! But is she being tried for that or for murder?” Jaenada’s conclusion about Dubuisson applies equally well to Dominique and to Bardot: “A trailblazer, she fought on her own against a whole prewar generation, against hundreds of years of hypocritical virtue . . . and male domination.” The brilliance of Clouzot in La vérité, and the reason for the film’s enduring appeal, is the filmmaker’s ability to display at the same time the disapproval, the hypocrisy, and the resistance to change of the generation he belonged to and the fascination with modernity and a new, freer, way of life of the younger generation, whose ambivalent attraction is perfectly embodied by Bardot.