Neither the deep impact of the landismo nor the idiosyncrasy of the Iberian male chasing Swedish women as a faithful exponent of the very gross domestic product had not yet exploded ... and the devil was already at home. Today it is not well understood how the gyrfalcons of cultural Francoism allowed the producers Iéna Productions and UCIL (France) and CEIAD (Italy) to land in 1957 on the Costa del Sol and open the door to the scandal in advance. And the scandal and the commotion landed on the beaches of Torremolinos in the form of a woman who embodied like no one else that indefinable mixture of eroticism and tenderness of which certain chosen creatures are capable. Brigitte Bardot (Paris, 1934) was. And when Roger Vadim's camera showed her in great detail, bare shoulders, bare feet, underwear, and even some missing buttock and chest lost between sequences of the filmThe jewelers of the moonlight , the marimorena was served. The beatas protested before the Francoist mayor of Malaga, Pedro Luis Alonso, because it was rumored that fresh meat ran on that shoot and because the Bardot did not contribute precisely to civil peace with its night baths in El Bajondillo and La Carihuela.
The thing did not happen to majors. Why? Because - and here comes the explanation for that unusual exercise in tolerance - the Franco regime was pearl erased from the international image of a poor and dark Spain with the smile of a blonde goddess. So, for peace an Our Father, the ever-applied censors looked the other way and the film was shot without major shocks. It was filmed ..., but it was not released in Spain. It was one thing to use the devil for tourist and propaganda purposes, and another to disturb the peaceful Spanish town by showing BB in minor cloths.
Now, a treasure of more than 400 photographs known in their vast majority comes to dust the oblivion that fell on that Spanish summer of Brigitte Bardot. José Luis Cabrera is the co-author, along with Lutz Petry, of the Torremolinos Chic website , a fun virtual corner from which a multitude of juicy information and comments are projected on the cultural and tourist heritage of the Costa del Sol. During a of his numerous journalistic inquiries to feed the web, Cabrera detected on an auction page the sale of more than 400 contacts by a French collector of cinematographic material. They include images taken on and off the set of Moonlight Jewelers that immortalize Brigitte Bardot at the height of her fame and beauty. It had 23 splendid springs and the world had already surrendered at its feet. BB had starred the previous year AND God created the woman (Et Dieu… créa la femme), who had catapulted her to stardom, also under the command of Roger Vadim, the first of his four husbands and one of the totems of French cinema from the fifties, sixties and seventies.
PHOTO GALLERY: The Spanish summer vacation of a French erotic myth
A selection of around 60 photos will be exhibited from November and for three months at the La Térmica cultural center in Malaga. Its director, Salomón Castiel, has made this rescue a personal commitment. As soon as José Luis Cabrera was alerted to the existence of the contact collection, he decided to acquire it. After the exhibition, the funds will become the property of the Archive of the Provincial Government of Malaga. "It was considered to be a photographic fund of sufficient importance for it to return to Malaga," says Castiel, who frames this initiative in the project to rescue the photographic memory of the city and the province, launched by La Térmica ago four years.
It would be a miracle for the French actress to come to Malaga for the opening of the exhibition. The old erotic myth from movies like The Woman and the Romper (Julien Duvivier), The Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard), Viva María! (Louis Malle) or The Will of Orpheus (Jean Cocteau) barely moves from La Madrague, his residence in Saint-Tropez, where he lives with his dogs, cats and pigeons. At 85, BB spends much of her time with the foundation that bears her name, focused on defending animal rights.
But from her home on the Côte d'Azur, Úrsula from Los jewelers del moonlight wants to evoke that Spanish summer in Torremolinos: “I loved shooting that film on the Costa del Sol, I will never forget it. She lived in a little house called Las Algas, on a deserted beach. A place that did not have any comfort, but that was a wild paradise ”, explains Brigitte Bardot to El País Semanal. The actress recognizes that, although Andalusia and Spain at that time had their charm, the chiaroscuro was not lacking. Not even in the eyes of someone who, like her, being an international star, was above the good and the evil of any shadow of oppression of the Franco regime. A regime that in those days, and for reasons of strategy, had decided to apply a kind of state of emergency in Torremolinos and the Costa del Sol ... positively. "I knew the best and the worst of Spain at that time," recalls BB. “It was both authentic and magnificent…, it is the Spain that I carry in my heart. It was there, in those days, where I learned to play the guitar and where I was taught to dance flamenco. A paradise".
Brigitte Bardot walking in a bikini down the Calle de San Miguel and entering the nightly sea of La Carihuela naked? It does not seem that it was so bad if you listen to the protagonist, who takes the iron off the subject because, she says, "people love to talk nonsense." "I never walked the streets of Torremolinos barefoot and in a bikini or bathed naked on its beaches," she says. “On the other hand, I do remember going to drink an ice cube one afternoon on the flowery white terrace of a small hotel. And I have the memory of a fairy tale. "
Brigitte Bardot undoubtedly refers to those endless summer evenings-evenings on the terraces of the Playa Montemar apartments, owned by the Viscount of Llanteno, or in the swimming pool of the El Remo club at the Montemar inn run by Carlota Alessandri, mother-in-law of Edgar Neville , and whose director was the Marquis of Nájera. Or in the lounges of the Marbella Club of the Hohenlohe.
But not everything was lights in the company of the aristocracy and in the light of the moon. On that Costa del Sol in the late fifties that the writer César González Ruano would define as "a territory of blondes in shorts and old children's dresses" Brigitte Bardot found more than one shadow, especially in the form of what she had been since she was young —e even in the same The Moonlight Jewelers - had been denouncing: the abuses against animals. Today she remembers it this way: “When I traveled to Andalusia I did not know that in that land, at that time, cruel and ruthless hunting was practiced in which greyhounds and hounds were used to chase hares. If the dog did not return with the prey between its teeth, they killed it by hanging it. I understand that these barbaric customs survive today and I find it scandalous. The truth is that long ago I wrote two letters to EL PAÍS to try to get the Spanish government to ban these horrible practices, but they ignored me. ”
And speaking of animal abuse. Who would say to the fierce activist for the rights of the beasts that one afternoon, in the bullring of Mijas, she was going to participate in a cape, even if it was due to a filming? So it was. One of the series of photographs that now comes to light shows Bardot layer in hand removing a heifer during the town festivities and evokes the sequence of the film in which the public - mostly men, women and toothless, dirty and tattered children, as if taken from some painting by Gutiérrez Solana— roars successive "olés!" the blonde young woman who had jumped into the ring as a spontaneous inlay in a black and white polka dot dress designed by the French dressmaker Louis Féraud, author of the film's costumes. In the stands, artificially enraptured, are also Úrsula's aunt, Doña Florentina (the ethereal Alida Valli) and Lamberto, the girl's dark and fatal love (a kind of stupid Andalusian play by a Stephen Boyd who two years later it would be the Ben-Hur testosterone Mesala ).
The photographs were taken during the filming of the film in Malaga locations such as Torremolinos, Mijas, Álora and Arroyo de la Miel and in Cuevas de Almanzora (Almería), and also during the actress' moments of rest, which, decidedly, He had a scary time during his Spanish summer. The contact sheets show Brigitte Bardot in every conceivable pose and attitude. Contemplating fascinated the dance of a flamenco couple in La Carihuela, bathing in the pool of the El Remo club while looking provocatively at the camera, posing with a Cordovan hat among the flowers of a whitewashed terrace, drinking from a botijo, putting on makeup and combing hair in minor cloths , participating in a pillow fight; dressed in mourning in the company of her other co-star, Fernando Rey; driving a convertible car, crossing a river in the company of a donkey and a pig, participating in the festivities of Mijas or getting off a Far West-style train at the Arroyo de la Miel stop, near Benalmádena. In all these images, the girl whom they already called “the girlfriend of the world” in the film industry and especially on coated paper shows a clear complicity with the author. Most were captured by the French photographer of Ukrainian origin Yves Mirkine, who along with his father, Léo Mirkine, stood out for more than 30 years in French cinema as one of the great names in the field of still photography.
The story of the Mirkine Jews could have given rise to a novel. In 1944, in full German occupation, little Yves, who was on vacation in the town of Séranon, near the French Riviera, was captured by the Gestapo during a raid and sent directly to the French concentration camp at Drancy. His father, Léo, who in addition to being a well-known photographer, was an agent of the Resistance and had turned his studio in Nice into a kind of clandestine mailbox, was also arrested shortly after and sent to Drancy. Only the change in the course of events and the arrival of the allied troops in Paris and occupied France saved them at the last moment from certain death. Of the seven children the Nazis took from the Séranon church, Yves Mirkine was the only survivor. As a filming photographer, his career was peppered with work alongside directors such as Claude Autant-Lara, Henri Verneuil, Jean Cocteau, Julien Duvivier, Michel Deville, Terence Young or Costa-Gavras. Both he and his father had stood out as photographers of the great stars present each year at the Cannes Festival and had established a relationship of trust with Brigitte Bardot prior to the filming of The Jewelers of the Moonlight, which helped her to star will be photographed without rest and in all possible situations.
BB's Andalusian film (or rather, one of them, because in 1971 he would return to Malaga and Torremolinos to shoot Robert Enrico's The Boulevard of Rum ) will not, of course, go down in the history of cinema. Neither the previous material - the novel of the same name by Albert Vidalie - nor the profession of Roger Vadim, nor the collaboration in the script by Peter Viertel, who by then was living in Marbella, managed to save the insurmountable: a rosary of clichés in the form of feature film. The farmhouse where Úrsula's uncles live seems more like a Mexican hacienda. The fighting scenes are dantesque. The sound, filthy. The story of amour fou , deficient if it were not ridiculous. And the image of Spain, that image by which the Francoist censors had swallowed and allowed this filming that scandalized the local prudishness, comes out much worse than bad: it is the portrait of an underdeveloped country of caciques and serfs dressed, yes, with "olés", flamenco and champagne in the moonlight. But there was a 23-year-old blonde girl who had seduced the world and who could do anything. Today she has a street in her name in Torremolinos.
The film was not released in Spain until many years later, exactly until the Spaniards who had made a pilgrimage to Perpignan and Hendaya to see boobs on French screens were already prepared - according to the leaders of the thing - to see them on their own. Sixty-three years later, an extraordinary collection of black and white photographs resurfaces as testimony to that summer of 1957. Brigitte Bardot's Spanish Summer.