VICE AND VIRTUE
Roger Vadim (1928-2000) was another new wave hero, if only briefly for … And God Created Woman, the movie that moved Brigitte Bardot into the limelight in 1956.
Vadim was more notable for his swinging lifestyle than his films, the strongest of which was a modern version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1959) that provoked the literati while pleasing the public.
Vice and Virtue (1963), released by Kino Lorber on Blu-ray and DVD, is a comparable update that did neither. Vadim and his writers transposed the Marquis de Sade’s Justine to occupied France: Juliette (Annie Girardot) is a cynically willing Nazi concubine while her virginal younger sister, Justine (a 19-yearold Catherine Deneuve, who gave birth to Vadim’s son a few months after the movie was released), sweetheart of a resistance fighter, is forced to become — what else? — a Nazi sex slave.
Juliette’s wickedness is mainly manifest in the indifferent filing of her nails as a German headquarters collapses in flames around her; Justine’s degradation is largely a matter of moping about a rustic chateau where, dressed in Greek tunics, the captive ladies are compelled to pose for Nazi generals whose apparent perversion is painting pictures.
Vice and Virtue could be called The Shallow and the Pretty, although in its chichi way it anticipates more formidable movies like Visconti’s The Damned (1969) and Pasolini’s Salo (1975). Dismissed by the film journalist Jacques Zimmer, author of Sade et le Cinema, as “calamitous”, Vice and Virtue cheerfully vulgarises both its subject and source.
Vadim spent the war in Switzerland and his sense of it seems purely abstract. Orgiastic tableaus that might have been imagined at the Playboy Mansion are punctuated by stock footage of falling bombs.
The movie “reveals the wild young French director in characteristic form”, the New York Times reviewer Eugene Archer wrote in a surprisingly sympathetic pan when Vice and Virtue opened 50 years ago at the Apollo, a 42nd Street movie house known for racy foreign fare and thus appropriate for a movie that, at best, is a sideshow to the sideshow to the sideshow.