Movie review - "Don Juan, or if Don Juan Were a Woman" (1973) **

Historically significant in a way because it was the last film (to date) for Brigitte Bardot, who never seems that interested in what's going on, despite the movie being a vehicle for her, and the director being her old paramour, Roger Vadim.

She plays a female Don Juan, very apt casting, who has a series of adventures. She confesses a murder to a priest (Matthieu Carriere) (there's a long scene with the two of them washing each others hands in close up which starts off interestingly but becomes comic), who she then tells stories to about her conquests - two main ones, rather: sleeping with a married man who likes archery (Maurice Rounet) whose life she then ruins by getting him to go to an orgy; then sleeping with the wife (Jane Birkin) of another married man (Robert Hossein); then a 70s guitar type (Robert Walker Jnr). Then she has a crack at the priest.

Bardot still looks pretty good and the scenes of her and Birkin in bed together are quite hot. It is always interesting to see her as a sexually voracious woman. There's a lot of drivel dialogue about the nature of men and women - Vadiim would have been better off getting Bardot to do a few more sexual encounters. The ending, where Bardot burns to death, feels like the inevitable triumph of misogyny.