Roger Vadim had married Brigitte Bardot and guided her career to stardom in the 1950s, at the same time becoming a successful director himself. Although they divorced in 1957, they remained friends, and still worked together occasionally. One of their final collaborations was Le repos du guerrier ("Warrior's Rest"), based on a best-selling novel by feminist writer Christiane Rochefort. The film was released in the U.S. as Love on a Pillow, which sounds like a racy romantic comedy, but like the novel, it is a frank look at the sexual obsession between a bourgeois young woman and a nihilistic wastrel whose life she saves after he's tried to commit suicide. The novel was so controversial and provocative that the wife of French President Charles deGaulle was quoted as saying that she would never let her husband read it.

By the early 1960s, Vadim's career was in trouble. His frankly erotic films faced censorship problems and he was having trouble getting financing for his projects. Bardot made Love on a Pillow out of gratitude to Vadim for salvaging her 1961 comedy, Please Not Now! after screenwriter Jean Aurel, who was making his directing debut, dropped out at the last minute. Bardot begged Vadim to take over as director. Vadim agreed, and since he had helped her out then, she now wanted to return the favor, and agreed to star in Love on a Pillow.

The role of the middle-class girl in the sexual thrall of a troubled man offered Bardot an acting challenge. As Vadim told the press, "you see her for the first time as a woman, not as a girl." The character was actually from the same background as Bardot herself -- bourgeois, conventional, thrifty, a planner and organizer. She changes her entire life and allows the man to abuse her emotionally for the sake of sexual gratification. Bardot's performance was fine, but audiences weren't interested in seeing Bardot suffer for sex, and even worse, they didn't get to see all that much of her. Most of her nude scenes showed only her naked back. Critics found Love on a Pillow's existential angst boring. Thomas Wiseman of Britain's Sunday Express called it "heavy and bloated when it should have been subtle and sparse." A.H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times, "The steamy, photogenic BB again is grappling with a new amour as though love were going out of style. The results are graphic but hardly new or penetrating." In spite of generally negative reviews, the film broke box office records in France.

Love on a Pillow was Bardot's fourth film with Vadim as director, and the thirtieth film of her career in a span of just ten years. She was no longer the gamine of her pre-stardom days, nor the sex kitten who became a worldwide sensation. At twenty-eight years old she was a new mother, twice divorced, and a survivor of two suicide attempts. She was weary of the chaos of international stardom, and announced that she would retire after Love on a Pillow. But it was another ten years and thirteen films, including one more with Vadim, before she carried out her threat to quit, retiring shortly before her fortieth birthday. Since then she has lived quietly in the south of France, Devoting herself to animal rescue and right wing political causes. When Vadim died in 2000 all four of his former wives, including Bardot, were among the mourners.

Director: Roger Vadim
Producer: Francis Cosne
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Claude Choublier, from the novel Le Repos du guerrier by Christiane Rochefort
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Editor: Victoria Mercanton
Art Direction: Jean Andre
Music: Michel Magne
Principal Cast: Brigitte Bardot (Genevieve Le Theil), Robert Hossein (Renaud Sarti), James Robertson Justice (Katov), Macha Meril (Raphaele),Yves Barsacq (Hotel Manager), Jacqueline Porel (Mme. Le Thiel), Jean-Marc Bory (Pierre)
102 minutes

by Margarita Landazuri