La Femme et Le Pantin (1958)

Julien Duvivier’s La femme et le pantin was an adaptation of the 1898 novel of the same name by Pierre Louÿs (translated into English as The Woman and the Puppet). The novel is one of the masterpieces of decadent fiction. Duvivier’s film has had several English titles including The Female and A Woman Like Satan.

The novel was filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1935 as The Devil is a Woman with Marlene Dietrich starring. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made (I’d put it in the top five) so attempting another adaptation was extraordinarily bold. And while Brigitte Bardot is an excellent actress there’s no way anyone could ever surpass Dietrich’s performance. The von Sternberg movie, like all his important movies, is a flamboyant and brilliant exercise in style.

In passing it’s worth noting that The Devil is a Woman was released in France as La femme et le pantin.

Eva Marchand (Brigitte Bardot) is a young French girl living in Seville in Spain with her father. He is a once-famous novelist with a slightly shameful past and he is now more or less in exile.

Eva is a dancer and a good one. She could earn good money if she accepted the offer to work in the nightclub owned by Arabadjian (Darío Moreno), especially if she worked upstairs where the girls do the erotic dancing. The problem is that Eva is a virgin and Arabadjian doesn’t employ virgins.

Eva has a boyfriend, Albert. Or at least that’s what Albert imagines, and he assumes that she will marry him, but it’s mostly wishful thinking.

Then she meets Don Matteo Diaz (Antonio Vilar). He is very aristocratic and very rich. He’s also married. That’s no obstacle - Don Matteo’s wife Maria Teresa (Espanita Cortez) allows him to have affairs. Her only concern in this case is that Eva might hurt him.

Eva is, as I have said, a virgin. He has indicated to Albert that she will lo him to take her virginity, but only if he’s a very very good boy. She makes the same offer to Don Mateo. Albert allows her to toy with him because he’s a nonentity. Don Mateo is however a proud caballero and it’s surprising that he allows her to string him along but he is obsessed and he is prepared to allow her to humiliate him.

Of course sooner or later the crisis will come.

We have to decide if Eva has any actual feelings for either man or whether she’s just enjoying playing them both for fools. The title obviously suggests that we’re supposed to see her as a scheming puppeteer.

My problem was that having seen von Sternberg’s movie multiple times it was almost impossible not to make comparisons. While I have a great admiration for Bardot (and anyone who thinks she wasn’t a fine serious actress hasn’t seen her in La Vérité) it has to be admitted that Dietrich had the ability to project feminine cruelty, and feminine pleasure in cruelty, in a way that Bardot can’t quite match.

Bardot was a different kind of actress and she’s playing the role her way. She’s enjoyable to watch but she fails to nail the character the way Dietrich did.

I think that the contemporary setting was a mistake. The proud caballero Don Mateo doesn’t feel quite at home in the late 1950s and the extent of his humiliation might have has more impact in an earlier time setting. And many of Eva’s games involve dangling the prospect of taking her virginity in front of both men as if it’s a treat for a well-behaved puppy. This doesn’t quite fly in 1958.

Duvivier can’t match von Sternberg’s visual tour-de-force but it is a gorgeous movie shot in sumptuous colour. And the brawl scene is superb, with the camera rocking back and forth as if it’s caught in the middle of the flying fists.

There are some unnecessary and distracting subplots that just go nowhere, especially the one concerning Eva’s father.

What we have here is a talented director, but he’s the wrong director for this movie. And a very talented lead actress, but she’s the wrong actress for this movie. I can’t help thinking that Roger Vadim might have had a better feel for the material. And maybe this is a crazy idea but it might have been been better done a few years later with Jane Fonda. Her French was sufficiently fluent to allow her to act in that language without any problems and she might have added just a bit more of an edge.

This movie doesn’t quite come off and watching it just convinced me even more of the genius of von Sternberg and Dietrich.