BB & Villa Malaparte

At the death of a world star like Brigitte Bardot, my thoughts inevitably turn to Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic film Le Mépris. Above all, it is the use of the Villa Malaparte on Capri that has fixed this place forever in my architectural memory, inseparably bound to Bardot’s almost divine body. On this secluded terrace, after the arduous climb upward, building and beauty merge seamlessly. Villa Malaparte is far more than a film set. Like Bardot herself, it is the main character.

The writer Curzio Malaparte had the villa built in the late 1930s, clashing constantly with his architect, Adalberto Libera. The result is a building that reads like modernism incarnate as a body of flesh, endowed with a theatrical soul. The famous staircase leading to the roof is therefore not a functional solution but a gesture: a ritual ascent toward exposure. At first Bardot’s buttocks are still covered by an open book, but soon the image leaves nothing to the imagination.

Godard films the villa as an object with a soul. The closed rooms, the hard lines, and the flat roof floating like a stage above the sea all emphasize architecture as a moral space. Bardot moves sensually through it, a contrast that only heightens the aloof, unapproachable nature of the building.

The villa was not built to offer comfort or intimacy. It was designed to stand alone, on the edge of the cliff, detached from the world and gazing out over the sea. In Le Mépris, that isolation becomes palpable: love evaporates here not because of conflict, but because of architecture.

With Bardot’s death, the villa remains what it has always been: a manifesto in concrete and stone. Hard, elegant, unyielding. A building that does not protect, but rules and observes.