And God Created Woman

And God Created Woman

Has this movie title ever been remade instead of a film? The 1956 Brigitte Bardot film “And God Created Woman” has little in common with its namesake besides the director, Roger Vadim. It’s a great title, yes, and while I can hardly recall anything about the original or certainly not enough to make a fair comparison I’m inclined to believe that this one is an improvement. Rebecca De Mornay stars as a woman prison inmate (wrongly sentenced, naturally) who yearns for freedom.

She escapes but makes the mistake of hitching a ride in the limousine of a politician (Frank Langella), who instead of turning her over to the authorities helps her break back into jail. Then he offers some advice: If she can find someone on the outside willing to vouch for her responsibility, parole is likely. This suggestion leads into what’s easily the movie’s best sequence. At this point De Mornay has discovered a local handyman (Vincent Spano), who’s making repairs on prison property, and seduced him. Then she makes him an offer.

She’ll give him $5,000 her inheritance if he’ll marry her and help get her paroled. He agrees and so begins another good stretch of scenes as these two incompatible people form what seems like an unlikely and totally unworkable couple. The truth is that much of middle section of “And God Created Woman” works pretty well, largely because De Mornay and Spano are so effective together but also because Vadim tells it economically and tells it good. De Mornay plays a young woman who knows exactly what she wants, without ambiguity or wavering; although she had sex with Spano in prison, now that they’re out together she won’t sleep with him anymore: “This is business,” she explains.

He’s shocked. So is she when she finds out Spano already has a family; he lives with a son and a kid brother. Then she makes some adjustments, although Spano is still mad that she’d rather rehearse for her rock band than get a day job or take care of the house. Meanwhile, she re-encounters Langella, who helps champion her cause as the deserving kid he’s rehabilitated.

The two flirt, have another brief affair and then split up after Langela’s wife (Judith Chapman) catches wise to something or another. And then the movie has become pretty stupid by this point there’s the threat that De Mornay may have to go back to jail, followed by an incident at a political rally and then, of course, the heartwarming close.

These movies annoy me because they don’t have enough ambition for the amount of imagination they contain. In the delinquent school girl and the carpenter trying to be a single father, De Mornay and Spano create two very interesting characters. Why did this plot, and these people, need the mechanical manipulation of the plot about the politician and his wife and the melodramatic events of the last reel? Wasn’t there already a story here? I think so.

So much does De Mornay bring to this performance that it lifts off the screen and threatens to redeem the bankrupt plot; she makes it live. And Spano is just as good, creating a whole world of hard work and pickup trucks, mortgage payments and romantic confusion. In a movie like this, people are enough. The experience of De Mornay and Spano simply learning to talk to one another is more dramatic than the whole showdown at the political rally. And in fact, I resented seeing them manipulated by plot: The young woman has broken out of one prison only to find herself in another.

Is it worth seeing? Sort of. You have to put the plot on hold, overlook the contrivances of the last half hour and find some way to admire how she plays that scene even while despising it itself. If you can do that, you’ll find good work here even by Vadim who may have been as trapped by it as everyone else was trapped by everything else by now that they’ve remade those words into this order which gives me an idea slightly better than when they had first made them into words: They should remake all movies like this one not this movie but another one again!

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