Displacement and self-portraiture in Louis Malle’s Vie privée

In Louis Malle’s 1962 Vie privée, Brigitte Bardot is placed into a fictional world where she plays a character, Jill, whose life closely resembles Bardot’s experiences as a celebrity. But the film, one of the few that Malle did not have total control over, developed a monstrous quality as its production mimicked the exaggerated life of Bardot. Fully financed by MGM and split between locations in Paris, Geneva, and Spoleto, Italy, the available versions of the film today include a poorly-dubbe...