"Enough already!" "Come on." "Fly away." "But watch out for cats!" "You, run off too." "Cities are no place for bunnies." "Poor Socrates, run off." "Look at Juliette." "What's she doing here?" "Little ones!" "Little ones!" "Come back." "I'm staying." "Little ones!" "Socrates!" "Socrates, come here!" "On the double!" "You're beautiful." "I look at your hair, your skin." "That adolescent emotion on your face." "I am perturbed, nostalgic for the childhood that discreetly shrouds you." "You are Juliette, in And God Created Woman." "And perhaps for the last time, Brigitte Bardot, before becoming B.B." "When I see you both, actress and young woman," "I don't know which one reveals the other." "Both of them, abandoned on that road, resigned to staying there, forever, with your animals, like in a fairy tale." "Like Juliette, you will never leave Saint-Tropez." "BARDOT, THE MISUNDERSTANDING" "I remember." "You said to me:" ""Why are you here?" "What for?" ""I want nothing from no one." "My pigs, dogs and cats are enough." ""I made a fresh start." "No need for people." ""No need to meet anyone, including you." ""I don't know you." "Make your film by yourself."" "You added:" ""You don't need me for it." "And I hate your beard!" ""In life, you can't rely on others." ""If you do, you'll never make it." ""Do things on your own, without asking." ""I trust you." "Now leave me alone." "And shave!"" "Dear Brigitte," "Our first meeting left me distraught." "Nothing happened as I'd planned." "I knew it would be difficult, very difficult." "We were in your other house, where you spend afternoons, sometimes all day, alone, surrounded by animals:" "dogs, cats, donkeys, pigs, even wild boar." "You're unpleasant." "I can't look at you." "You dislike my beard." "You tell me." "I'm perturbed." "I thought I'd please you." "I didn't want to hear your fears about evoking that period." "I was embarrassed." "Despite your violent words," "I still loved you, still wanted to persuade you." "I had the crazy idea to make a film about you, with you." "To take your hand, pull you from that darkness you chose, bring you back to light." "Here I am." "What do you think?" "I think I'd have to be abnormal to object." "You know, we were very worried." "About what?" "Your reputation." "It seems you never show up." "Not only for appointments others make, but also for ones you make." "True?" "My best answer is my presence." "This may be a first." "In fact, your reputation isn't great." "Did you come to insult me?" "To set the record straight." "So you can answer your critics." "I'm here to defend myself." "I don't think people blame you for being late, but for having succeeded while making it all seem so effortless." "Is it true?" "Did everything come easily?" "Not at all." "It was a little hard." "Maybe not as hard as for others." "But nothing gets you nothing." "If hell on earth exists, my first film, Crazy for Love, is a good example." "Awake at 6, incredibly badly made up, silenced, shoved around by vulgar assistants, vile producers and make-up artists." "Disdained by talented actors, forgetting lines, awkward, ridiculous." "I was over my head, sinking into the depths of shame and distress." "I was clawed at by a make-up lady, a fat, vulgar, horrible woman who did as she pleased with my face." "She enjoyed torturing me." "Slathered an ochre foundation on my face." "It smelled rancid." "It was a mask." "Then she sealed off that sticky mess with rice powder." "And my mouth." "Ah, my mouth." "Hers was like a piggy bank slot, so mine was a real problem." "She had to efface it." "For her, it was a defect." "She stuck a mirror in my face and I wanted to cry." "Make-up lady, how I hated you!" "You're beautiful!" "You scared me." "Really?" "Blush a bit." "It will suit you." "A picture, Miss?" "Souvenir?" "No, no pictures!" "We'll see later." "Javotte." "What a pretty name!" "I'm Jean-Marco." "Theatrical agent." "When I take on a girl..." "she becomes a star." "You're built for the stage!" "For the stage?" "You'd knock them dead." "And I'm never wrong." "Actress." "You think so?" "Why not?" "Learn a bit of a role." "A few words." "Call me in Rouen." "I'm in the book." "I wouldn't dare." "Why not?" "Would seeing me again be that bad?" "I began my career very young." "Father liked to make movies." "With his camera he filmed my entire childhood, leaving me with precious shards of memories, for they are forever lost." "On the left, your mother." "I see a little girl who does as asked." "An awkward smile, sweet, tender." "She lets herself be manhandled, wonders what they want." "They call out to her." "She wants to run away, go back to her toys, her timid exploring." "Is it towards Mommy that she's running?" "No, she is free." "She wants to live." "The little girl knows happiness lies elsewhere." "She wants to turn away, but a firm hand redirects her to the eye filming her." "She is shown a mirror and turns away again." "She smells a trap." "Too late." "Another one." "The camera." "Caught up, like Mommy." "Caught up in our gaze." "A game for us moviegoers who cannot stop staring." "And you, locked in the male gaze, prey to men's mercy, already provoking them." "M"i anou, your sister, is born." "You're in the kitchen with the nanny, whom you hate, who was chosen for her." "1939." "M"i anou's baptism." "When did you notice you were getting less attention?" "You seek the camera." "Force yourself to smile." "Was your father filming you before, or your mother?" "What do we see here?" "A baptism celebration." "A French bourgeois family." "This is clear." "They invited the cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents of course." "The whole family." "And friends." "The women, elegant." "Men with monocles." "Eccentricity, exquisite and troubling." "We barely see you." "You're on the edge of frame." "The camera films you, as if by accident." "Not part of the party." "Are you like me, a worried, troubled observer?" "Something in the air is scary, haunting." "Like a presentiment." "Everyone pretends to ignore it." "Like an instinctive animal," "I sniffed out something strange." "The grownups were preoccupied." "Hushed talks between Grandfather and Father." "My parents' friends didn't laugh like before." "They were glued to the radio, listening solemnly to the news." "War, war..." "It was the only word I heard." "It scared me and I asked Mother what it meant." "Louveciennes." "Grandparents' house, during the war." "You come for weekends and holidays." "We all want to assign to certain memories that moment when we felt that life lost something essential." "When we felt cut off from the basis of our beliefs." "There is a memory, Brigitte, which you often evoke..." "One day, our parents went out and left us with the maid." "We were playing Indians under a table, which was our tent." "Our feet got caught in the tablecloth." "It slipped off the table, pulling with it an absolutely gorgeous Chinese vase." "It was Mother's pride and joy." "When Mother and Father came home," "M"i anou and I were hiding in the broom closet." "Trembling, we knew our punishment would be harsh." "Each one of us got 20 lashes on the behind, by a father white with rage." "That wasn't all." "Our furious mother's sentence was short, abrupt, irrevocable and decisive." ""You're not our daughters, but strangers." ""Call us Sir and Ma'am." ""This is not your home." "It's ours." ""Nothing here is yours." "It's not your home."" "I was 7 and a half." "M"i anou was 4." "I see why she dresses like her mother." "The same turban, the same walk." "Imitating, mimicking, trying to reclaim lost territory." "Searching for approval, encouragement." "Not easy." "Mother is pretty, elegant, and seems so indifferent." "How to express your need that she look at you again?" "I cried looking in the mirror." "Yes, I was ugly." "I wish I looked like M"i anou." "Long red hair down to my waist." "Our parents' favorite." "I closed up on myself." "You grew up feeling that part of your childhood was lost." "You mourned your childhood during it." "Every event is painful." "Your sister's birth, like the war." "The certainty you're less loved, less pretty, less smart," "Like when you learned Santa didn't exist." "You were 10." "It was over." "My childhood died with those fairy tales." "Those marvelous dreams, illusions." "I cried after that discovery." "I so need fantasy to live." "Only dance class allowed me to forget those worries." "Dance." "It was a visceral force for me." "I blushed when I was surprised." "I loved dancing." "As if I were another me." "I loved our exercises at the barre!" "Over and over, to warm up our muscles and prepare our bodies for work." "Farewell glasses, complexes, sadness." "I awaited the pianist's music like a magical door to my true self." "Dance made me beautiful, inside and out." "I was talented, supple, arched." "My muscles long, fine, graceful." "My sense of rhythm allowed me to follow the music perfectly." "You found your kingdom." "As in fairy tales, you were able to escape that mortal combat with the mirror." "Your instinct was right, but things would have ended there, had you followed it." "In this photo, you're 12." "Looking down at the floor, serious." "Your governess' presence emphasizes the abandon and mastery of your pose, an ambiguous invitation to question you and to respect your silence." "She seems powerless with you." "She could never understand your feelings, and would consider you too young for them." "I'd like to show you this photo." "To ask if, as I think, you're overwhelmed by melancholy and immense solitude." "The evening of my communion, after everyone left," "I ended up suddenly all alone, sad, tired." "I had to remove my pretty dress, forever." "I walked around the block." "I walked slowly, showing everyone what would soon vanish." "You grew up." "Why does "implacable" pop into my head?" "There is in your posture and grace, your bearing and figure, your ease in crossing the frame, something implacable." "This something takes our breath away." "What did your father see at that moment?" "Did he realize he was filming your metamorphosis?" "You're at an intersection." "You feel your kingdom in danger, unaware you'll be sacrificing it." "Part of you will be taken away, for good." "You don't know what or how, but this subtle, oblique sensation fills you with sadness." "Does your mother realize the gazes she thrived on are now for you?" "It was inevitable." "She had to accept it." "A princess' cradle is guarded by good fairies." "Your mother's friends watched over you, beautiful, elegant, refined." "Yet still, I worry." "What spell might they cast?" "They tease your filming father." "They stoke his desire." "Offer their flesh to him." "They use women's wiles to keep the male gaze on them." "Have you fallen in the trap?" "Not yet, perhaps." "Do young women think of making love?" "Does it happen to early?" "Did this rivalry make your mother tend to her looks?" "She wanted to be a model or actress." "Interested in fashion, the era's style, she made hats." "Her friend suggests you do a photo shoot for Jardins de la Mode." "She is quick to accept." "What future did your mother want for you?" "Did she wish to be in your shoes?" "Like a mirroring effect?" "I did the shoot." "Mother stayed with me." "One never knows with photographers." "I was proud." "No glasses, no braces." "I was cute." "The pictures were appreciated." "Helene Lazareff saw them and asked me, via a friend of my mother's, to do the cover of Elle in May of 1949." "Terrified, shy, full of hang-ups, with Mother there," "I arrived in the studio." "Jam-packed." "Mother knew everyone." "I thought I would faint." "They looked at me, discussed my teeth, hair, nails." "No, I wasn't made up." "I was just 14 and a half." "No, no bra." "I was just 14 and a half." "No, I didn't know how to pose." "Just 14 and a half." "One year later, in 1950," "I became the mascot of Elle." "Fate began to advance against my will." "Marc Allegret saw the photos and asked to meet me." "When you met Allegret, Vadim opened the door." "And fate began to advance against your will." "I am 15." "I had never met a man like Vadim." "He was handsome." "Nothing like the men I'd encountered before." "We witness a revelation." "A girl falls in love for the first time." "It happens before our eyes." "On camera." "We feel that intense gaze on you." "The gaze burns us." "It goes beyond the actress in you, the character you're becoming." "Vadim's gaze transforms you." "We're part of your transformation." "He transforms your young love, the desire you feel for him, into love of cinema." "Cinema, mirror of the heroine born before us." "You're 15 and a half." "Vadim saw me at times, then more often, then all the time." "At my parents' house." "At 15 and a half I couldn't go out alone." "One day I cut classes and met him at his bachelor pad." "It was 9:30 a.m. and I took my bus as usual." "Heart racing, schoolbooks in hand," "I got off and changed buses." "He was waiting, as he said." "At 9 a.m. it would be unusual and lovely." "I was naked in his bed, the wonderful sensation of his skin on mine, certain he was fully awake despite his sleepy tone of voice." "That cumbersome virginity would be gotten rid of, step by step." "Every day less of it remained." "I was worried, as I dressed in front of him, to know whether this time I was at last a real woman." "It was a period of wondrous discovery." "Along with his body, I discovered mine." "My behavior changed." "I was a different person." "I felt superior and strong." "Daily problems seemed stupid." "I wondered how we could live for anything other than love?" "First time, first frolics, first body, first encounter." "I remember." "First sensation, scents of bodies, skin." "I remember." "I was swept away by the thrill and panic that it would never be as good." "It was an obsession." "That day I left my parents." "I too knew life was elsewhere, not at home with them." "Impatient to leave, never return." "Fear of losing that "other me", as you say." "Love gave me wings." "I became stupid." "You say it makes you free." "You loved Vadim with teenage ardor." "To escape the weight of family, paternal strictness, maternal indifference." "To live." "I don't know why I bought this fish from a pet store." "The aquarium, to my great surprise, cost more than the fish." "3 euros for the fish, 17 for the aquarium, almost 15 for fish food." "Tending to animals is expensive." "A friend and neighbor is worried whether the fish is well fed, fearing I neglect it." "You really think love makes you free?" "Strange idea." "My parents decided" "I wouldn't marry Vadim until I was 18." "We were married at the Passy church on December 21, 1952." "I had my white dress." "Le Boum, my grandfather, led me to the altar." "It was moving, pretty." "All over the press." "I was the favorite of magazines, Vadim, of film." "We were young and carefree." "We could now sleep together, out in the open." "Everything would be normal." "I now had the right to sleep with a man." "I signed papers before witnesses." "I could make love legally." "But that night, nothing happened." "We were too tired." "Legality had exhausted us." "We fell asleep, happy in each other's arms." "Leaving your childhood there, you turn a page." "Cruel irony of fate," "Marc Allegret, who turned you away from dance, cast you as the dancer you'd like to have been in real life." "In class, you were never so alive." "I'll get jealous." "Don't catch cold." "Still rehearsing?" "No, I'm done." "You wanted to be a ballerina." "Dance protected and formed you." "It set you apart from others, from your mother and M"i anou." "Why do we give up?" "Do we do so gradually or suddenly?" "By laziness?" "Not believing in your dreams?" "Fear of not being good enough?" "That gentle embrace... unsettled by love, dizzying, making us feel alive." "Deadly embrace to which girls are prey." "You close off dance and discipline and open yourself to light." "As this cruise ship singer, you remind me of Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." "I briefly imagine you an American actress." "You remain French." "Never again this lounge singer." "When you sing later, it's your voice we hear." "You're beautiful and surprising in this color film." "Am I dreaming of America, Monroe, or you?" "It was the Cannes Film Festival in 1956." "I had to go." "Vadim had never directed." "Raoul Levy, never produced." "I had proved nothing." "We decided to shoot a film called" "And God Created Woman." "We didn't seem serious." "Three clowns preparing a party for sponsors." "No backers would finance us also-rans." "I was the stereotypical starlet." "The one everyone talked about." "Fortunately." "We needed to finance that damned film." "Yet even by pulling every string, we could barely shoot it in black and white." "It had to be in color." "Going there was a pain." "Since I had to take the plunge," "I jumped." "I bleached my long hair." "Golden blond suited me." "I looked like a lioness." "This new hair color was a pivotal point in my career." "Like all shy people, insolence and aggressiveness were my greatest shields." "My arrogance disguised a terrible vulnerability." "Woe to the one by whom scandal comes." "Woe to me, for scandal came." "Education and decorum exist only by those who invented them." "I invented the opposite." "No longer a slave to propriety," "I rejoiced in impropriety." "And so I arrived one night hair down, clinging dress, shoes off under the table." "My only jewel... a huge hickey given to me by a lover, ephemeral but ardent, which I proudly boasted as if it were a 15-carat diamond." "The era of the cha-cha-cha." "The band was great." "I danced alone or with anyone." "Barefoot, carefree, wild." "Annoying for women, exciting for men." "Raoul Levy, Vadim and other friends eyed me strangely." "Away, dance school and its implacable discipline!" "My hips rolled and swayed." "I was hot, in a frenzy, simulating sex to the tam-tams." "As if another me took hold of my body." "The champagne cooled me." "And then darn..." "I was too hot." "I poured my glass over my chest, shoulders, thighs." "So cold, so nice, so wild." "I'd become crazy." "That night, Vadim added a scene to And God Created Woman." "Stop!" "Juliette... please." "You remind me that desire is fluid and cruel." "There is grim pleasure in following one's instincts for a quick thrill." "You're a child playing with fire, provoking and refusing limits." "Indecent, insolent, contradictory." "Vadim knew me so well, he shot no scene more than twice, aware that I became less and less natural." "Trying to seem natural in love scenes with Jean-Louis Trintignant, my partner in the film, made me fall in love with him." "My relationship with Vadim had become like siblings." "I felt great affection for him, but was no longer in love." "My passion for Jean-Louis was all-consuming." " Antoine!" " Hello, ma'am." "Hello, Mr. Carradine." "Hear the news?" "Juliette, back to the orphanage!" " You glad?" " I wouldn't have waited." " She's a kid." "Just playing." " Playing house!" "She needs tenderness." "Someone who understands her." "Makes her toe the line." " Anyway, she's leaving." " We can stop it." "It won't help her." "Or anyone else." "Mr. Carradine!" "You say we can stop this from happening." "How?" "If a man loses his freedom so she can keep hers." "By marrying her?" "He'd never show his face in public!" "She won't find him here!" "What do you know?" "I'm back in Saint Tropez, walking in this cemetery." "You promised we could shoot today at your home." "You cancelled, as always, the day before." "I was distraught, but still alive." "Yes, still alive." "I'd given up on meeting you, questioning you, weeks ago." "But you promised I could shoot there." "We're running out of time." "My producer is at wit's end." "I don't tell him." "Yesterday in the train, I got the news." "I'd never believed your promise." "Sitting in the train, I got this message:" ""Brigitte is exhausted by her fight for animal rights."" "Something about an elephant." ""You must push off the shoot."" "I respond curtly:" ""It's impossible." "The crew is there." ""I risk getting fired."" "You understand the urgency." "Here I am, waiting for news." "I walk around." "I look at the sea, at a wall you built for privacy." "Around La Madrague." "Your first family is here." "Your parents," "Vadim, a real Russian prince." "He taught you to use your real self in acting, inspired by your relationship, your character, that terrrifying duality inside you, remants of childhood that will betray you." "As if by accident, he used it to liberate all of cinema." "Juliette and you speak alike." "Like you, Juliette understands that love and cinema may go wrong, and it's all one." "This is cinema in the past tense." "That way you both act, mixing life and cinema, gravitas and lightness, real-life love and fiction." "This confusion between work and life, in this film, like a miracle, revivified a generation." "Its modernity, contemporariness, thrilled youth," "Godard and Truffaut, the New Wave." "In a way, you were a band of outsiders," "Vadim, Levy, you." "The band of your twenties." "I head for the hotel, knowing I won't see you." "I must deal with your absence." "Your cinema will outlive you." "Juliette will outlive Brigitte." "There is a magic hour in your lives." "Alost hour." "Hour of youth, no boundaries among love, friendship and work." "Unlike your fathers, you cut off the old world to invent a new one, on scale with your desires." "I can still believe in cinema, in its stories, the truth of our lives and aspirations, our failures and downfalls." "Not happy?" "I've been asked that before." "Tell me if you're fed up." "I started loving you." "So what's wrong?" "I'm scared." "You're a little kitten." "Your love must be strong." "Like a madman." "So tell me!" "Say you love me, I'm yours, you need me." "Kiss me, Michel." "Kiss me." "Juliette?" " I'm scared." " Of what?" "It's hard to be happy." "I walk around La Garrigue, your afternoon home, your refuge." "I come across this small house." "I think of your idyll with Trintignant." "Adieu eccentricities, cha-cha-cha, clubs, gowns, cocktails, interviews." "Adieu Vadim." "Jean-Louis wanted just me, bare, simple, savage." "He taught me the constellations, classical music." "He taught me love, total and intense." "A woman's dependence on the man she loves." "My greatest memory with him was a week we spent isolated from everyone during Christmas of 1956, at a remote farm in Cassis." "Our only visitor was a gorgeous wild cat." "He lived on the hill and looked like a tiger." "Every day I fed him." "On Christmas Eve we walked to midnight mass." "I felt like a Christmas figure from my childhood." "I'd like to have carried on my head an enormous clay jar." "All I had was a cotton scarf, like a woman in a Nativity." "The last night of 1956, we spent alone by the fireplace, drinking lukewarm champagne." "At midnight we went out into the aromatic air." "The stars were our mistletoe." "My time with him was the most beautiful and happiest of that part of my life." "Insouciant, carefree, and especially..." "anonymous, incognito." "I never experienced again such peace and gentleness as during that short vacation." "How I loved the old-fashioned calm of that doll house, where I spent the ten best days of my life." "We've come nowhere." "Nowhere!" "Where is that nowhere?" "In the discovery that at the world's end disenchantment lurks." "Disenchantment of a film lacking the magic of the first." "A glum repetition of what once happened and has vanished." "Disenchantment that love comes to an end, because reality comes knocking and love never prevails." "Disenchantment that a glance cannot rekindle desire." "That to reunite, bodies must now fight clutch violently, because danger is lurking." "You shoot this film, The Night Heaven Fell," "Vadim's pale response to And God Created Woman." "Your nudity is lurid, as are your poses." "And yet it perturbs me." "You go all out, one last time, it seems, before the betrayal." "the imminence of the end rekindling desire." "Your death in the film, your betrayal in life, this infinite tenderness you show him, the man you loved when you left him." "This tenderness trumps the daily grind, as if only betrayal could re-enchant love." "I loved Jean-Louis madly." "I loved him as I've perhaps never loved again." "I didn't know." "I was too young." "My thirst for life tolerated no constraints or concessions." "Concessions spell death." "I wanted to live." "The loss happened." "Nostalgia for love lost remains." "A series of lovers, then emptiness." "No more first times." "First marriage, first love, first passion." "Models for all others." "Love etched within, to which all others will be compared." "How do we regain what is lost?" "Fragments in the mind, fragments of relationships, scattered memories, lingering sensations, detached from their sources, desire blindly trying to take form." "Like birds searching for land, our dreams panic and circle round." "What is it?" "Come in." "Who's there?" "What time is it?" "11:30." "It's not late." "I have no watch." "I'm sorry." "Give me your coat." "It's nice here." "I fell asleep the second I got here." "Not going to bed?" "Come here." "You were afraid to shoot with Autant-Lara." "Afraid to do this film." "Afraid of Gabin, who called you "That thing that walks around naked"." "In the end, you proved your talent." "He said you were an actress in your own right." "In your own right." "A still from Love is My Profession." "You lift your skirt." "Censored from the film." "Another scene, naked in front of his secretary." "Provocation, scandal." "Eroticism." "I'd never used that word." "Eroticism." "You nude, others clothed." "In our heads, the dirty idea that your nakedness shapes humankind's future." "For you, Brigitte Bardot, and also for you, Yvette in the film, being so free makes what follows inevitable." "You incite inevitable passion." "Inevitable is the desire to destroy you in order to possess you." "Inevitable, your death, your killing." "I come across these pictures." "I recall a German word," ""Das Unheimliche", the uncanny." "A woman, naked, vulnerable, exposed as if it was perfectly normal, as if unaware of her nakedness." "Like in some nightmares, where we are naked amid a fully clothed crowd." "We become aware we're naked." "Another film heroine dreams she is chased by dogs, naked." "Dreyer's Gertrude." "When the dogs catch her, she wakes up." "That's when she realizes we are alone in the world." "I want another life too." "At times, we all feel we've had enough." "Lack of love, doubts about choices, lead us to imagine radical reversals, intimate renunciations." "We toy with standard fantasies we've rejected before and will reject again soon after." "Can we live something other that what we live?" "Once when a friend died, I thought of leaving Paris for the Alps." "Every morning, for months, I took shelter in that dream." "You found your change." "You shot a film in England in 1959," "Babette Goes to War." "You were 24, but here you look older." "The suit, probably." "In the film, your future husband, Jacques Charrier." "You don't know it yet, but is he why you seem bourgeois and proper?" "A desire to reclaim lost territory, not of childhood, but that of a young woman ready for marriage, comfort and security." "Desire to toe the line in an innocent comedy." "Scandalous because it's a fable about war, not about your body." "A popular comedy." "Like when you were a young girl modeling knitwear in Jardins des Modes." "A perfect young woman playing at boy sports, temporarily hiding her femininity." "Paradox." "No one knows what you're really hiding." "The image recounts one war to hide another, the one you are secretly waging:" "Brigitte vs. B.B." "You think you're pregnant." "I was never such a daredevil." "Riding horses, climbing on planes, jumping with a parachute, scaling walls, landing on my belly, here, there." "I was exhausted." "But if I was exhausted, the unformed fetus possibly inside me must have had it pretty rough too." "I knew I would wear it down." "Jacques was thrilled to hear the wonderful news." "His happiness was contagious." "After all, maybe he was right." "Having a child was nice." "I was always at war with myself." "Hence my hesitation, my fear of decisions, my panic in having to choose." "Strange character." "Hard to live with." "For others and for myself." "Forever loved by the children we remain, who like pure-eyed innocents" "polite, braided girls sensible dresses, often checkered." "I feel like shouting out at you:" "Watch out!" "These appearances are traps." "You wanted to believe, hoped to please your parents." "Marrying the son of a general in Louveciennes, at your grandparents' house." "Honeymoon in Saint-Tropez, at your home." "You offer these photo albums." "Fake smiles, fake tenderness." "Shams." "You don't want what's growing inside you." "Call it reality." "It undermines the images, the pretty pictures, the myths we create." "Reality can hide behind the illusion of happiness that must be feigned no matter what, until it backfires." "La Madrague, your home and shelter." "Lots of wind." "I recall what you wrote about fear of motherhood." "You wonder why having a baby scares you." "Why such a visceral refusal?" "You say you're not a monster." "You say you like animals, their vulnerability and dependence, even their childlike side." "Those in distress move you." "You ask questions, but have no answers." "And me?" "What could I have hoped for?" "To be the only one who knows the truth?" "Who is able to separate the true from the false?" "To show you who you are, even if it's too late." "How boastful." "Or did I secretly want to film the effects of time and absence?" "To feel the ghosts around you, signs of a life intrinsic to my love of cinema," "for it creates, via conflicts and momentary changes, that heroine larger than any single event that defines her." "In the evening of January 10, 1960" "Jacques and I were watching TV when I felt a sharp pain in my stomach." "Hunched over, gasping for breath," "I told Jacques I was dying, there was nothing to be done." "Like a dying animal, I screamed my lungs out, giving into my suffering." "The contractions were so close, I couldn't catch my breath." "Sweating, vomiting, drooling, crying, screaming," "I lay on the floor, convulsing so much that I rolled across the room like someone possessed by the devil, calmed only when they see a cross." "Then, that ice-cold table, that sacrificial altar where I offered my genitals." "I saw heads leaning into my crotch." "Modest about my body and the mystery of my genitals, here I was splayed open, like in a butcher's, bloody, as the eyes of strange strangers dissected me." "A powerful force made me empty my insides." "I wailed as I expelled my guts from myself." "I breathed in a vile odor." "I was suffocating." "The gas mask was asphyxiating me." "Bells furiously ringing mixed with the cries of newborns." "I saw blue lines, yellow lines." "I heard distant echoes, endlessly repeating." "My body was burning up from within." "Regaining consciousness, I realized it was my baby lying in my arms," "I began to scream, begging they remove it." "Nine months of this nightmare, enough was enough." "They said it was a boy." "Yes?" "Excuse me..." "I'm looking for Annie Marceau." "She just left." "Where are you going?" "Wait here." "She'll be right back." "Come in!" "Shut the door!" "You can come closer, you know." "I don't bite." " So you're Dominique?" " You bet." "Gilbert Tellier." "Have a seat." "Do you smoke?" "With that music, I thought I had the wrong door." "Not reallyAnnie's style." "Hers is boring." " Mine too." " No kidding." "Common bands makes me puke." "As simple as that." "They turn me on." " Annie never mentioned me?" " No." "What a hypocrite." "You see her often?" " Pretty often." " Screw her yet?" "You're going too far!" "She's a good girl." "So why wait?" "It'll make her more sociable." "She's already sociable." "A great friend." "We go to concerts together, I give her advice..." "You two are funny." "Life's not about fun!" "That's not what makes it worthwhile." "Enough of high principles!" "Enough of high principles." "Six months after childbirth, despite Charrier's pleas, you made The Truth, by Clouzot." "Like a king, you have two bodies:" "one sacred, one profane." "A sheet covers the sacred body, subduing the sexual frenzy." "The profane body is incarnated by your sister, clutching her leeks, future housewife, prey to convention." "Brunette and blonde, your own duality." "Lover and wife." "Clouzot resuscitates B.B.'s body, destructive and free." "He seizes you, your contradictions, and judges you in court." "And we are the judges." "Our lives are pieces of a puzzle that don't fit together." "Disjointed, incoherent, contradictory." "And we can't stand it." "Charrier has sunglasses." "You have braids for the reporters." "These images hurt me." "All three of you will suffer." "This, I know..." "But not the rest." "There's nothing to understand." "You'll leave him." "Too much love." "Not enough love." "The wrong love." "You won't raise this child." "These are facts." "Beyond the facts, your faces." "You, with braids, look like a happy mommy." "Him, with sunglasses that must hide tears." "Our indecision before these images." "Before our perception of them." "Lesson in cinema." "What do you think of these images?" "A mother smiling at her baby." "Do we think she loves him?" "Is it an act for reporters?" "It depends on what we want to believe." "Where is the truth here?" "We want there to be one." "Undeniable, irrefutable." "Allaying our doubts, jibing with our biases." "These images kill me because the acting is sincere." "So?" " Did you night out end well?" " Not bad." "Not bad... in bed?" "And... was it any good?" "Not bad." "So you'll do them all?" "The whole list?" "So what?" "Bitch!" "In fact, this is good." "I'm glad I came." "You fall in love with Sami Frey." "I see you both." "I'm envious." "I envy that moment you spent together." "Your hands, entwined, perturb me." "I don't know whether I'm jealous of you or Sami." "You and Sami incarnate a virginity that is amorous, even sexual." "Like two lost children." "Sami, the Polish Jew whose story overwhelmed you." "One day he told you that when he was 4 or 5, his mother hid him under fabric in their Paris workshop, Rue des Rosiers." "He couldn't move or speak until the game was over." "A loud knock at the door." "Banging boots, foreign accents." "Part of the game, no doubt." "When he finally came out, his mother was gone." "He never saw his parents again." "Both died in Auschwitz." "You believed him." "I'm blown away that you were, that you believed him." "You seem as in love with his roving childhood, as with his eyes, his skin, his scent." "You listen, moved, and add:" ""He never knew tenderness, a warm home," ""and hid with me from the world that rejected him."" "I look at this picture." "Two children lost in the fog of reality." "You break social and religious barriers that separate you." "Only love, and your mutual desire, will triumph." "One day I came to set very depressed, unsettled by a violent fight with Jacques." "Sami and I were waiting off-camera for the light to signal us to go on set." "We were alone and I tried in vain to hide my tears." "Sami noticed." "He said nothing, took my hand, clutched it and didn't let go." "I felt incredibly happy." "From that moment on, whenever we were alone," "Sami took my hand or held me to his chest, saying with his eyes what he couldn't say otherwise." "It felt so good to be in love." "Life became something else." "You know..." "I'd never have imagined." "Me neither." "A court is a theater of appearances, like cinema." "With you, Clouzot creates a mise en abyme." "I see everyone's eyes on you." "Vengeful, accusatory, at times, rarely, compassionate." "I see they don't believe you, in your love, your emotions." "Your indifference and liberty would undermine your credibility." "It's decided in advance." "They humiliate you in the name of truth." "They judge you not for what you did, but for what you are." "Too pretty, young, free." "Too selfish." "Too different from the middle-class, moralizing, surrounding you." "They enjoy your being put to death." "Like a corrida, with its rules." "They're here to see a young woman put to death." "Clouzot forces us to confront this dark side within us." "The ease with which we condemn those who are different." "It is a comedy of justice, a duel between two lawyers." "Truth means little." "The truth of the strongest will rule." "It foretells what you will undergo in the press." "Yes, Gilbert loved me!" "You can't admit it!" "It bothers you!" "It's the only truth!" "I was stupid, mean, full of flaws." "But he still loved me." "Now I won't see him again." "Never again, you understand?" "Nothing matters now!" "Nothing scares me!" "You're all dressed up, ridiculous!" "You judge, but you've never lived, never loved!" "That's why you hate me." "You're all dead!" "I was never an actress." "Either I didn't care or I lived what I acted, destructively, believing it was real." "I never took on a character." "I let them take over me." "When Dominique kills herself," "I was in total despair." "Clouzot drew a parallel between me and my character." "After all, I'd left my child and my husband and my lover had left me." "I was the symbol of perversion disdained and alone." "On your birthday, when you turned 26, you tried committing suicide." "You barely evoke it." "It's these reporters who wrote awful things." ""Her suicide, another failure."" "Blaming it on your immorality and lack of spiritual awareness." "Is suicide a return to childhood?" "An idea of childhood, the one before disaster struck?" "Is it an attempt to turn back time?" "To make an about-face?" "We think death will be like life, a fresh start." "If we get through it, we can believe again." "No more separation between one and oneself oneself and others, oneself and love, oneself and life." "Let's get back to cinema." "In 1962, you say you'll make no more films, while making Louis Malle's A Very Private Affair." "After every shoot in the winter, you come to La Madrague." "This retreat between films is a time of love." "A time out of time, a present you wish would last forever." "I close my eyes and see you." "You walk across the frame, naked, beautiful, and free." "There is in cinema something impure, a mix, you think, between real life and fake." "You say you've always maintained that cinema is artificial, a deformed copy of life." "snippets that never make a whole." "I think it's our lives that are confused, awkward, composed of snippets without logic or form." "I recall a line from Truffaut's Day for Night." ""I know private lives exist, but they're always clumsy." ""Film are more harmonious." ""No traffic jams, no wasted time." ""Films move forward like trains, trains in the night." ""People like you and me are meant to be happy working in film."" "You think if you rid your life of cinema, you'll rid it of confusion and find life's truth." "a term you often use." "You think film intrudes on your life, disturbing it, imposing repetitive cycles which over the years weigh you down." "You want to stymie, at any price, the fate which is your own." "You believe more in the truth of fresh air, of thyme, lavender, the scents of Provence, than in the truth of cinema." "You felt trapped, forced to use your private life for your roles, until it destroyed you, as you say." "You believe, like a child, that abandoning the cinema will save you." "You want your life simple and real, real like your emotions and instincts, real like your feelings, like your home." "Asshole." "Fuck." "Shit." "Goddamn." "Bullshit." "Son of a bitch." "Damn it." "So?" "Still think it doesn't suit me?" "Why won't you make love anymore?" "Fine." "Come on... but fast." "I often thought Camille might leave, like a possible catastrophe." "Now I was living the catastrophe." "Before, it was like living in an unconscious bubble, a rapturous complicity." "Things happened inadvertently, quickly, madly, magically." "I ended up in Paul's arms without knowing how I got there." "Now this inadvertence was lacking in Camille, and in me too." "Even aroused I could observe her gestures coolly, as she could probably observe mine." "I had uttered those words fully aware I was seeking revenge." "She realized a lie could patch things up temporarily, for appearance's sake." "She seemed tempted to lie but on second thought, she didn't." "Paul made me suffer so." "Now I tormented him, alluding to what I'd seen, without naming it precisely." "Deep down I was wrong." "Her unfaithfulness was at most an appearance." "The truth was yet to be known, regardless of appearances." "The more we're seized by doubts, the more we clutch onto false lucidity, hoping that reason will explain what feelings made murky and obscure." "I often thought Camille might leave, like a possible catastrophe." "Now I was living the catastrophe." "Before, it was like living in an unconscious bubble, a rapturous complicity." "Don't be like this." "Contempt, Godard, Bardot." "I'm 15." "I see this film." "As if entering a theater for the first time." "I see pieces of film, one after another." "I don't understand." "I'm blown away." "I realized something was at stake." "Like the essence of cinema itself." "Totally artificial, totally intimate." "I thought that thanks to fiction," "I might, later on, understand life." "With this film, I left my childhood." "It was wonderful." "Now I was part of the New Wave." "Godard was truly frightened to meet me." "So was I." "He came to see me." "I called him Mr. Godard." "He called me Miss Bardot." "He watched me serving tea." "He wanted to see me as I really was." "During the shoot, he never said another word." "Contempt is about the end of a love story." "About that moment when a tiny incident changes one's perspective, irreparably, tragically." "I feel contempt for you." "That's what I feel." "That's why I no longer love you." "I feel contempt." "Your touch disgusts me." "Camille!" "Wait for me." "You go too far." "Forget what I said, Paul." "Pretend I never said it." "You are simple and real, yet the film is a tragedy." "No tears, no pleading, no heavy-handed psychology." "What others added on to you, Godard took away." "And thus, he turns you into a true actress by removing all the artifice." "You attain your truth, which no longer needs your sincerity." "Revealed despite yourself, you get under Camille's skin not Camille who gets under yours." "Camille is beautiful." "You'll never be so beautiful." "I loved animals." "That's how I met you." "When I was 8, my parents gave me a book of yours." "Not about film, but about your love of animals." "The title, as simple as can be:" "Brigitte Bardot, Friend of Animals." "I leafed through it, fascinated as much by your blondeness, long hair, safari jacket, as by the animals you went up to:" "tigers, but also sheep." "Dogs too." "I especially loved dogs, which I wasn't allowed." "This is how I met you." "The child I was fell in love with you." "He grew up as we all do, searched for you in films, in vain." "At the end of the 70s, we rarely saw your films." "He forgot you as he grew older." "Love of film soon outweighed his love of animals." "Another shelter saved him from childhood." "Sometimes in movies, love stories end well." "And the ones that end badly allowed him to tame, to repair the disenchantment around him, his parents' neglect, like a foretaste of adulthood." "Violently, my love for you came back via the movies, when I saw Contempt." "I was 15." "You'd stopped making movies for 15 years." "I opened myself to the world." "You'd cut yourself off all that time." "I sought you out again." "We'd travelled in opposite directions." "I was disappointed." "I dreamt of you as Tristana," "Buñuel's perverse, icy blonde heroine." "Happy and sad, in Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which you refused, I was told." "Mysterious and erotic with Truffault." "Wildly innocent with New Wave directors." "Nothing of the sort." "In 1973, at the age of 38, you decide to give up cinema." "I'm at your house, La Madrague." "I look out the bay window." "I recall another shot from Contempt." "You look at the sea through an opening." "It is both close and faraway." "It is Ulysses' sea." "Ulysses, constantly blown off course by unfavorable winds." "wandering amid the islands, battling the curses, the wrath of the gods." "At 29, when you made Contempt, you could choose between the great actress we'd glimpsed, or drop it all." "Something in your trajectory as an actress evokes the notion of fate, a struggle against a destiny you'd rather flee than tame." "You never wanted to be an actress, or learn to become one." "The great directors pass you by, those who'd have bared your flaws, the fragility of your acting." "As I write these words, I think of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning." "I considered calling this film:" "Brigitte Bardot, Kaddish for an Unborn Actress." "I mentioned it to my producers." "No way." "I'm the one mourning." "Penelope too, but one who never sees Ulysses again." "Ulysees." "You." "Battling unconscious gods since your childhood." "Now that cinema is receding from your life, you don't know your next destination." "What is the real life you search for?" "How do you find it?" "Where?" "In love?" "You drift from joy to disillusion, in and out of love, longing for time past, regretting not living the splendor of the present, not having enjoyed the instants life offers." "Strong winds carry you elsewhere, into the ferocious thrill of destroying what you just thrived on." "These photos were taken after Contempt and before Viva Maria, in which you starred with Jeanne Moreau." "I am captivated by them." "You've changed." "No more light-brown hair." "A real blonde." "You seem open to every possible romantic adventure." "As if Camille's beauty survived the tragedy of the film." "I find you exciting, irresistible." "Your face is carefree and gentle." "Your perfume is L'Heure Bleue." "During the magic, blue hour flowers release their scent." "It is as if you just made love." "A moment of grace after climax." "Everything in your eyes and face seems light-hearted." "You make us want to make love, even fall in love." "Also, at the beginning of the blue hour all the birds sing for a few seconds." "I give myself to men I fancy" "Never the same, as if by chance, see?" "May he who no desire has shown" "Cast at me the very first stone" "I had only one true love" "Poor me, he got rid of" "But I am not one to fret" "Adieu Romeo and Juliette" "In the summer of 63, I met Bob Zagury." "The liveliness and joy of Brazil took over La Madrague." "Bossa nova quickly replaced Vivaldi on the stereo." "Bob was an amazing dancer." "He had velvety eyes, long white teeth." "I suddenly unleashed all the life force I had inside me." "The house filled with friends." "A nonstop party." "I played guitar with Brazilians, danced in Bob's arms." "But I couldn't lose Sami, not for anything." "On the phone, I loved him entirely." "I'd see him the next day, never leave him again." "He was my love, my conscience, my root, my despairing hope, my life, my death." "He was time and infinity." "At that moment, Bob arrived, joyful, charming, innocent, tender, irresistible." "He licked my tears, spoke gently, consoled me." "He'd take me to Brazil, to places that were pure and wild, like me." "He'd never leave me." "Even if I had to shoot in Kamchatka, he'd come." "I was his little girl, delicate." "He wanted me happy." "He warmed my heart and body." "It was so nice." "He saw to everything." "I just had to let him." "It was relaxing." "So much charm." "He could do so many things." "He swept me away." "He was positive." "Leaving Sami foretells your separation with film." "I'm right, aren't I?" "In fact you exchange Sami, the dark Polish Jew, for Bob, the Sephardic Jew who lived in Brazil, plays poker." "Enough clichés." "But I'm sure Bob was funny." "In New York promoting Viva Maria, with Louis Malle." "Bob isn't far off." "A walk by the sea." "I identify with you." "I think of our loves, the repetition of our affairs, our beliefs." "Memories come back." "I fell in love so often." "Often I wanted to believe." "Often disappointed, often disappointing." "That's when I met Gunther Sachs." "He was a prince." "His graying temples, his wavy hair a bit too long, his willful, tanned features, his enormous height and indefinable accent which he used when speaking in nuanced French got the better of my preconceptions." "It was love at first sight for both of us." "I was hypnotized." "I'd known many men before, been in love, known passion." "But that night I was swept away in Gunther's arms, to a magical land I'd never known and that I'd never know again." "I began living the wildest time of my life, my most unreal happiness, my deepest sorrow." "That rain of rose petals at La Madraque." "Our arrival, barefoot, at the Casino de Monte-Carlo when Gunther played 14 and won three times in a row." "That night with a full moon when Gunther, in his Ariston boat, in a tuxedo, his black cape with a red lining, like a bird of prey, picked me up at my dock so we could follow the moon's path until dawn." "A few days later, he told me he'd wait for me all night at the Bonne Fontaine restaurant, one of the few dinners where it was just us two." "He gave me 3 bracelets and wedding rings blue, white and red, sapphire, diamond and ruby from Cartier." "I wasn't to remove them during our idyll." "That night, at La Madrague," "Gunther asked me to marry him." "He decided it would be on July 14th, in Las Vegas." "I was happy to die for, stupefied, happy to live for, stunned." "My hand in my future husband's, my lover's, my lord's," "I'd follow him anywhere, terribly in love, fascinated, hypnotized, and proud to be his future wife." "I think of Fritz Lang's The Secret Behind the Door, of the bride's despair upon realizing things are not like her dream." "Still, you are suprised when Gunther plans the wedding with pals in Vegas." "Even more when, despite the emotion of the wedding," "Gunther asks to have it repeated, to immortalize it in photos and a film." "Your suffer when he leaves you for hours on a Tahiti beach during your honeymoon to play chess with a friend." "You soon learn he married you to win a bet." "And you cry." "Your love story is fake, a sham, just like what you thought of cinema." "You left Bob, drained by the daily grind." "You dive into a dreamlike illusion." "It's one big film set, a facade." "You realize when Gunther arrives at La Madrague with his dishes, his coat of arms, his staff, his silver." "You wonder once again:" "Where is love, where is life, where is truth?" "My hand in his immediately provoked a mutual shock, an unending, unfinished bond." "Uninterrupted, uncontrollable electricity." "A desire to melt, to meld." "A magical and rare chemistry." "Infinitely decent indecency." "His gaze met mine and never left it." "We were alone in the world." "Alone in the world." "During that everlasting minute which still lasts," "I never left Serge, who never left me." "It was a mad love, the kind of love you dream of, forever etched in memory." "I need no one on Harley Davidson" "I recognize no one on Harley Davidson" "If tomorrow, death should strike" "My fate was to take a hike" "I care less about my life than about my bike" "When I am on the road" "And I feel my machine explode" "The desire down there reaches overload" "I was about to drop out of the Bardot special in Decembre of 1967, when I got a call from Serge Gainsbourg." "He spoke sparingly, soflty." "He wanted me to hear, me and only me, one or two songs he'd written for me." "Did I have a piano?" "Yes." "He came to my place, Avenue Paul Doumer." "I was as intimidated as he." "On the piano, he played Harley Davidson." "I didn't dare sing." "Something in his gaze made it impossible, a sort of shy insolence, an expectation, with a zest of modest superiority, strange contrasts, teasing eyes in an extremely sad face." "Dry humor." "Eyes welling with tears." "I hummed, timidly." ""I need no one on Harley Davidson."" "The words got stuck." "I sang off-key." "I recited his insolent text like a Lord's Prayer during last rites." "He asked if I had champagne." "Yes, I always do." "So let's have a glass." "I hope it's Dom Pérignon, Dom Ruinart or Cristal Roederer." "No, just Moët et Chandon." "No matter." "Tomorrow, you'll have a crate of Dom Pérignon." "We drank the bottle of Moët." "I sang Harley Davidson brazenly, sensually." "He was happy." "So was I." "The next day I received the crate." "He came to rehearse." "The ice was broken." "A few days later, we finished the crate." "And then another." "You and Serge shared an erotic complicity." "You didn't really hide it." "You forget Gunther Sachs." "You call him your bogus husband, your showbiz puppet." "Serge takes you out to cabarets." "You dance till dawn, mutually intoxicated." "Serge was an anxious person, always afraid he'd lose me." "Each time I showed up seemed miraculous to him." "The fact that I'd chosen him seemed impossible." "Passionate encounters after endless separations, even I'd only left hours earlier." "One night I heard him on the piano, chain-smoking." "I fell asleep." "Next day, he sang Bonnie and Clyde." "It was 1967." "Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway scored a hit with the film." "We'd score another with the song Serge wrote that night." "She's pretty and her name is..." "Bonnie." "Together they formed the Barrow gang" " Their names:" " Bonnie Parker" "And Clyde Barrow." "When I first met Clyde way back when" "He was loyal, honest and upright." "I guess it must be society" "That permanently destroyed me" "One day he played me his love song." "I Love You, Me Neither." "He cried." "So did I. The piano neither." "When we recorded I Love You, Me Neither, late at Barclay Studios, we each had a mike." "A feet few apart, we held hands." "Oh my love" "Like a wave... indecisive" "I come..." "I come and I go" "I was embarrassed faking it, like Serge, in a sigh, my desire and my pleasure, before the recording crew." "Serge reassured me, a squeeze of the hand, a wink, a smile, a kiss." "It was good." "It was beautiful." "It was pure." "It was us." "When I see Serge in the house he bought for you two," "I recall your last minutes together." "I suffer." "Not for you, bit for him." "He's the beautiful one." "I sense his dizziness when you say you're going for two months, to Almeria, for a film." "A real separation, unbearable for him." "You reassure him, promise to come back." "He can read you." "He knows you won't come back." "Fills your suitcase with sweet nothings on music paper." "Afraid of losing you, of it killing him." "Like children, you take a blood oath." "You slice your fingers, write "I love you"" "with your blood." "He does the same, but writes "Me neither"." "Serge is the man who loved you totally, tenderly, tragically." "You leave him." "Second Kaddish." "For a love that couldn't die." "You recount that 30 years after your first kiss with Serge, you speak again." "Hearing each other on the phone, you almost faint, both of you." "The next day he says to join him in his little house, Rue Verneuil." "Pictures of you, of you and him, all over." "On the walls, on the piano." "Even a bottle of your perfume, L'Heure Bleue, of which he'd take a whiff when alcohol and cigarettes plunged him into a nostalgia which he fought with sleeping pills." "From then on, you spoke often at night, on the phone." "I'm in your bathroom." "I think of you and Serge." "Certain loves will not die, cannot die." "At one point, things are still possible for the last time." "Meeting the other is meeting oneself." "I imagine you both could have run away," "That love could have trumped both of your fragilities." "I imagine your dizziness to see the door finally open, to feel you could leave that hall of mirrors, your prison." "It's as if I felt that love beating inside me." "I'm afraid too." "I can't play win or lose either." "I know the danger of leaving childhood to live." "Instead, this decision to save animals." "Every animal, nonstop, all over." "A girlish dream, a challenge to achieve." "Or a movie heroine." "I think of Ingrid Bergman, Irene in Rossellini's Europe 51," "Dreyer's Gertrude," "Bess McNeil in Von Tier's Breaking the Waves." "We can't know if they're saintly or crazy." "Your commitment is total, radical, absolute." "See?" "I still think in terms of cinema." "It's how I want to see you." "The door opened." "You found your way out." "You'll open the cage like Juliette in And God Created Woman." "You'll save them from dying and live off having set them free." "You'll become heroine of your own life" "Your kingdom will be childhood, once and for all." "At Louveciennes one day, armed with a broom," "Daddy chased a poor mouse into the basement." "I saw that helpless creature running, terrified, every which way, and Daddy's pitiless broom slamming the tiny body, exhausted but still alive." "I was horrified by such barbarism." "I begged Daddy to stop the massacre." "Thinking the mouse finally dead," "Daddy put the broom back as I gathered the animal's trembling body." "The mouse was still alive, but scared stiff." "I put it in my sweater sleeve and joined everyone for dinner." "I'll always remember its warm body against my skin." "It ran up and down my left arm during the meal with Daddy, Mommy my grandfather, Granny and M"i anou." "It tickled as it ran up to my collar." "I moved my arm and it ran back down my sleeve." "No one noticed a thing." "It was just between the mouse and me." "After dinner," "I went outside to let it go, begging it to watch out for Daddy." "It seemed to trust me." "I'll never forget it." "Subtitles by Andrew Litvack" "Subtitling TITRA FILM Paris"