Il disprezzo

It all starts, with so much elegance and grace, with such smooth outlines, that your eyes caress and trace, Paul Javal and bride Camille, she seeks assertion, he makes her feel, that he won't allow a soul to take his place. But the ties that bind are easy to let go, and Camille is feeling Paul isn't so true, like a plate than can be shared, causes contempt and despair, and attraction comes unstuck like perished glue.

An often tricky piece of cinema that hardly entertains but leaves a mark that you may or may not be able to reconcile. Brigitte Bardot is as elegant as ever, in a film about a film that leaves you pondering how on earth could Paul Jarval let her go and wondering how many times you need to re-watch it to gather the intent.

This lush, stylish story of a disintegrating couple's interactions with a grotesque Hollywood producer give Godard a chance to examine and present his views on the internationalization of Hollywood in the sixties, broken relationships and the state of the filmmaker's art. It's all beautifully evoked in CinemaScope by cinematographer Raoul Coutard, with a dream cast (Bardot, Jack Palance, Michel Piccoli and legendary director Fritz Lang) and solemn music by Georges Auric. Among the most interesting aspects of the movie is how much of a "Godard" film this production eventually turns out to be in spite of the director's attempt to go for a more mainstream product. Visually arresting, intellectually stimulating and one of the great mid-century, art-house classics. It's great to see this picture given the "Criterion treatment" on DVD!

Contempt is the type of film that can create that feeling between itself and the audience watching. It is a strange mix of cinematic magic and unrealistic psychobabble. Jean-Luc Godard is one of the greatest of all directors and perhaps the most successful of the French New Wave, one of the most important occurrences in film history. He had already hit success with his ground-breaking Breathless and his personal My Life to Live. Here, he is at his most experimental, even more so than in The Little Soldier. From the opening shot of a camera tracking an actor down towards where the narrative camera is, there is no doubt this is a unique picture.

We then get multiple scenes involving the strangest nude scenes ever recorded. This film stars Bridgette Bardot, one of the most beautiful and captivating women ever to be in a movie, and Godard intentionally films her almost completely without a sense of eroticism or sexiness. She, like everything else here, is objectified, pushed away and gives us a chance to consider other films we have seen.

This is a rare gift to film lovers, a story that cannot be judged on standard grounds because it is not a standard film. Godard, I believe, is showing the absolute boundaries of the cinema, daring to go farther than nearly anyone before or after him. For most, it will totally polarize them and perhaps turn them off to Godard or even foreign films completely. But, that should not be the case. True, this is a head-scratcher, but you cannot expect normalcy from a director like Godard. Here, along with most of his other work, he proved that the director, if given freedom, can change the look and feel of a film to an unlimited amount of options and opportunities. Roger Ebert said that Godard never made another movie like this because he realized he couldn't. I think he didn't because he realized cinema hasn't reached those limits yet; and perhaps never will.

With Le Mepris (1963), French filmmaker Jean Luc Godard strings together at least three different narrative strands, each of which are in some way connected to the central story of a couple falling out of love, and all further set against an additional thematic backdrop of film-making and ancient Greek mythology. With this technique, Godard is clearly attempting to not only present us with a vicious satire on the business of movie-making, but also attempting to deconstruct the very notion of film-making by contrasting the soulless and mechanical approach to studio production, with the trials and tribulations of a torturous love affair.

As with the vast majority of Godard's work - particularly of this era - Le Mepris is very much a work in the meta-film tradition; in the sense that it is a film about film-making that is constantly reminding the audience of its own artificiality and manufactured design. This ideology is evident right from the start, as Godard begins the film with a lengthy tracking shot, which finds the camera following in front of a camera actually within the film and also in the middle of a similarly complicated tracking shot. To add further ideas of self-reflexivity to the proceedings, Godard appears himself as the film's assistant director, with his cinematographer Raoul Coutard manning the equipment. As the shot progresses, a cold and emotionless voice-over beings narrating the opening credits - though no text appears on screen - whilst the camera continues tracking towards us, edging closer to us until both camera and audience are starring directly into one other and the endless abyss that they represent.

It's pure Brechtian deconstruction, years before Godard would refine the influence of Brecht with the difficult masterpiece Week End (1967), which shares some elements familiar from Le Mepris, in particular the use of the couple as a metaphorical reference point for some kind of greater ideology and a natural continuation of many of the film-making techniques that Godard had been developing since A Woman Is A Woman (1961). This brings us to the story at hand, with Le Mepris focusing on a jaded scriptwriter (Michel Piccoli) setting out to polish the screenplay for Fritz Lang's big budget adaptation of Homer's epic, The Odyssey. From this set up we are introduced to the writer's beautiful and enchanting girlfriend (Brigitte Bardot), the arrogant U.S. film producer (Jack Palance), and the great man himself, Fritz Lang.

Each of these four characters will be involved in their own separate strand of the narrative that will run concurrently alongside the other characters, whilst in turn, laying reference points to the likes of Ulysses, The Odyssey, Fellini and The Rite of Spring, to create the overall foundation of the film itself. This is only the first quarter of the film and already Godard is churning out exciting idea after exciting idea to smash apart the worn clichés and generally accepted limitations of film in a way that is as startling, boring, joyous and confusing as anything else he has directed. The visual design is just splendid, with Godard and Coutard moving further away from the Nouvelle Vague/Cinéma-vérité influences of their earliest work and incorporating beautifully vivid primary colours, the use of cinema-scope, complex and seemingly random tracking shots and camera movements and sporadic bursts of music to disarm the viewer during moments of dialog.

The centrepiece here is the near-infamous twenty-minute long sequence that takes place between the writer and his girlfriend in their vast, open-plan apartment, in which jealousies, bitterness and petty arguments blow up and cool off amidst a series of seemingly mundane, everyday-like activities. What makes the scene work is Godard's far from invisible directorial intent, as he attempts to excite, bore and eventually move the audience into becoming interested in these complicated and far from conventional characters whilst simultaneously using the set up to offer a skillful deconstruction of his own film's narrative, the narrative of Homer's Odyssey, and the film that Lang is making. This ties into the further film-within-a-film-within-a-film (infinity) abstractions, with Godard continually making allusions to the idea that the film we are watching could easily be a film being made.

The film also works in a circular sense, opening with that aforementioned scene in which Godard points the barrel of the lens directly into the audience whilst narrating his own credits, whilst the final shots shows the camera drifting off towards the sunset as Godard yells "cut". With Le Mepris, Godard clearly struck the right balance of cinematic invention; beautiful photography, use of colour, costumes and music, a recreation of Cinecittà as a pastoral ghost town (a comment on film-making in itself), etc, whilst achieving a subtle symbiosis between his characters, his narrative and his philosophical subtext. For me, this is perhaps the strongest 'narrative' film the director ever made before abandoning generic storytelling and instead striving for greater artistic substance.

I suppose in this day and age it is easy to look back on Godard's once radical use of cinematic experimentation - and his genuine desire to challenge the medium of film far beyond the usual presentation of conventions like character and narrative - and see it as something that is hollow and dated; a pseudo-intellectual exercise in cinematic deconstruction that is there to be endured, as opposed to enjoyed. Though this may still be true for some viewers - particularly those at odds with Godard's personal style and the very 60's idea that art could be entertainment and that anything was possible - there will be other viewers who are far more in tune with the notion of cinema for cinema's sake, and can better appreciate the film for what it truly is.

Paul (Picoli) is hired by vulgarian US producer Jerry Prokosh (Palance) to rewrite a screenplay for his adaptation, which Fritz Lang (himself) insists on shooting in a hyper-stylized, mythological fashion. Paul's relationship with his trophy wife Camille disintegrates as she feels abandoned by him to Prokosh's advances, and sees him subdue himself to these great men.

It is about film-making - of course! - it is about the plight of the artist, but where it succeeds most is in the carefully examined slow destruction of Camille and Paul's marriage. Raoul Coutard's cinemascope photography, filled with lush colors, only serves to highlight how little Paul is and how out of his depth he is. He and his wife hide it in different manners: Paul by trying to assert intellectual superiority over his wiser-than-she-appears wife, therefor earning her contempt. She hides by relying on her sensuality.

Godard typically references his love for film in a way that many will find pedantic, and the lush score isn't always wisely used, overwhelming and sometimes even obtrusive. But thankfully, Godard's message and cast survive the director's pseudo-intellectual short-comings. Bardot is perfectly cast as the ignorant innocent who strives to appear and be smarter than she is (even sporting a brunette whig at some point, in what is really a sad moment of self-loathing), but fails. Camille never convinces when she speaks, but the pain in those eyes is intensely real. Picoli's Paul is easier to sympathize with, as the "reasonable" whose every move to please anyone dooms him further. It is a cruel lesson and warning about relationships.

The film also serves a more sarcastic and amusing (and far more conscious) duel between Palance's Prokosh, superbly vulgar and dramatic, and Lang, who becomes a wise and immensely charismatic figure that stands against compromise. It is sad that this was the German master's only performance in front of the camera.

Le Mépris is slow, and if you get caught too much in Goddard's referencing and hyper-stylization, it will bore you. But if you really follow these characters, you're in for a unique, edifying and sometimes unnervingly uncomfortable ride.

Must be seen several times under different angles to be fully appreciated.