A Very Private Affair (French title: Vie privée, meaning Private Life) is a 1962 French drama film directed by Louis Malle.
Jill (Brigitte Bardot) leaves a comfortable upper-class existence in Switzerland to live in Paris on a whim. Thanks to her beauty, she winds up becoming an extremely popular movie star. Being constantly chased by her fans and paparazzi, she moves back home for some peace and runs into an old family friend and theatre director, Fabio (Marcello Mastroianni). They become lovers and she moves in with him in Italy while he's preparing a play, but Jill's fame haunts her even there and puts the relationship in jeopardy.
Tropes:
- Celebrity Is Overrated: As a movie star, Jill puts up with crowds of crazed fans, ravenous paparazzi, and the media which scrutinizes her love life and calls her a whore. It gets to the point where she won't leave her house for fear of being swarmed.
- Downer Ending: Fabio keeps Jill shut up in his house without seeing anyone and the boredom of such an arrangement gets to her. Fabio is annoyed that even he has become a target of the paparazzi due to his connection to Jill. This leads to them having a nasty argument that is never entirely patched up. Jill then attempts to watch Fabio's play by walking on the roofs and falls to her death after being startled by the flash of a paparazzo's camera.
- Interrupted Suicide: Jill's romance with Fabio starts when she attempts suicide and he rushes to her rescue, keeps vigil and nurses her back to health.
- Paparazzi: Jill's massive popularity causes paparazzi to swarm around her with their cameras like flies. At one point she desperately begs a group of them waiting outside her dressing room to stop.
- Peaceful in Death: The film's last shot focuses on Jill very calmly falling to her death in slow-motion, seemingly glad at her fate.
- Slut-Shaming: Jill has a hostile encounter with a cleaning lady in an elevator; the lady says she reads all the stories about her sleeping around on the newspapers and demands to know why she won't leave "the poor boys" alone, rants about how her brother is fighting in Algeria while Jill gets paid millions just for taking off her clothes, and finally says that Jill will someday pay for it all with her life and nobody will feel sorry for a slut and a bitch. She even comes close to physically assaulting Jill, who runs out of the elevator in tears.
