Don Juan (or If Don Juan Were a Woman) (1973)

Synopsis: The legendary and mythic tale of lecherous seducer Don Juan, a character represented in the work of Mozart, Molière and Lord Byron, among others, is given new life in Roger Vadim's 1973 camp classic DON JUAN (OR IF DON JUAN WERE A WOMAN). Brigitte Bardot gives an icily self-assured and... The legendary and mythic tale of lecherous seducer Don Juan, a character represented in the work of Mozart, Molière and Lord Byron, among others, is given new life in Roger Vadim's 1973 camp classic DON JUAN (OR IF DON JUAN WERE A WOMAN). Brigitte Bardot gives an icily self-assured and erotically charged last performance in her farewell film as Jeanne, the feminine incarnation of the Spanish ladykiller, only this time she is a man-eating, devil-may-care Parisian socialite who lives in a glamorous tinsel-ensconced submarine moored on the Seine. The film is structured as a string of flashbacks of Jeanne's misdeeds and misadventures, all told in a desperate and forbidden lust-tinged confession to her priest, who also happens to be her handsome young cousin. Tales of callously destroyed lives, illicit liaisons, Swedish orgies, lesbian flings, and other caprices leading to suicide pepper Jeanne's memories and refract the legend of Don Juan through the mirror of the sexual liberation of the 1970s. Bardot's beauty and magnetism and Vadim's idiosyncratic vision of love and romance combine to create a campy yet compelling contemporary antimorality tale not unlike Vadim's first film with Bardot, ...AND GOD CREATED WOMAN. [More]