Cinema: Bust

Love on a Pillow. On the wide screen in full color looms an eye approximately the size of a swimming pool. The next shot: gargantuan lips. The blonde hair is a veldt of tangled desires; the whited torso stands out like Gibraltar. Put them all together, they form Brigitte Bardot, back again in an epidermoid epic directed by her first husband Roger Vadim (And God Created Woman). For those who may have missed BB on earlier outings, Vadim—apparently reminiscing—offers the Grand Tour. He photographs her frontwards, backwards, sideways, closeup, long view, and from above, through what appears to be a hole in the ceiling. And in one memorable variation, he has her running the vacuum toute nue. Based on a bestselling French novel, Warrior's Rest, the movie casts Bardot as a girl who inherits a fortune, goes to Dijon to collect it, instead picks up a suicidal rake named Renaud (Robert Hossein). After saving his life, she feels responsible for him, so she moves him into her bed, where most of the action takes place. Soon she gives up friends, family and fiance. "This situation is permanent?" sniffs her mother. "Well, for the moment," says BB succinctly.

Poor Bardot. She has seldom looked more beautiful, and between zips she delivers intimations of creditable talent. But Director Vadim displays a flair for the banal that few actresses could conquer, particularly in his final scene: windblown and fully clothed, Bardot stands rigid amid the sun-drenched ruins of a Tuscan cathedral, while Hossein makes one of those long, long walks to fling himself at her feet.