En Cas de Malheur
2011
Inkjet on watercolour paper
85 x 64 centimeters
I have only seen excerpts from the 1958 Claude Autant-Lara film, En Cas de Malheur, and those segments strike me as somewhat overwrought. However there is one very spicy scene with Brigitte Bardot, sans panties, which has earned it notoriety and, briefly, censorship in English speaking countries. It was during my childhood and teenage years when Brigitte Bardot played the sex kitten in European films from the 1950s to the 1960s, so she has a mythological status which has stayed with me into adulthood. Another reason for reimagining this film is the writer who wrote the novel on which it is based, Georges Simenon, the master of lean prose in the service of psychological crime fiction.
This recreation was a pleasantly easy project, that famous black and white film still provided the compositional structure and I lent it a sensuously warm colour palette. The Cupid and Venus statues were included because of their association with love and the symbolism extends to the vulgar penis pattern in the wrought iron bannister railing. The man is depicted as the jerk who abandons caution in pursuit of a delirious sexual encounter which will destroy his standing in a milieu who place a premium on trustworthiness and probity.