Contempt

Continuing my sporadic look at the films of Jean-Luc Godard, I turn to his sixth film, and one of his more celebrated. Contempt (Le Mépris), was made in 1963, and was a curious combination of the aggressively experimental Godard with the mercenary interests of big-time producers Carlo Ponti and Joseph Levine. It as at once both commercial and anticommercial.

The first thing to consider about Contempt is how visually stunning it is. In fact, I would rate it right up there among all the films I've seen in terms of look alone. On this latest viewing, I hardly noticed the story at all, and was just slack-jawed at Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard's use of framing, lighting, and camera movement. Every shot is bliss. It also contains one of the best and most ingenious uses of a female sex symbol, Brigitte Bardot.

Contempt is a story told in three acts. It is about the dissolution of a marriage, as told against the backdrop of the movie business. It is about artistic prostitution, the difficulties of translation and adaptation, and the juxtaposition of classicism and modernism.

The first part of the story is set at Rome's Cinecitta Studios. A film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey is being made. The director is Fritz Lang, the great German director. He is played by Fritz Lang. As it is described, he is playing a director named Fritz Lang, but is not necessarily playing himself. The producer is an American vulgarian (a stereotype common in European films), Jack Palance. He is like a walking erection, prone to fits of anger and volatility. While watching rushes of the film he focuses on a scene in which a nude Penelope frolics in the sea. Palance does everything but oink while watching. He complains that the film on screen is not what is in the script, and hurls a film can like a discus. Lang jokes that he has finally discovered Greek culture.

Michel Piccoli is a screenwriter hired to do rewrites. He is married to Bardot, once a simple typist. Palance makes it all too clear that Piccoli is being hired because he has a beautiful wife, and a quid pro quo is expected. Piccoli, who is not sure whether he wants to write movies, detective fiction, or plays, is tantalized by the money, and urges Bardot to accompany him to the shoot in Capri, in effect pimping her.

The second act, which is really quite extraordinary, is a Strindbergian pas de deux between Piccoli and Bardot in their apartment. Godard uses the camera like a voyeur, planting the camera in a distant room, watching the two actors move from space to space like caged panthers. They argue, each take a bath, sit on the toilet, and effectively end their marriage. The takes are extremely long, sometimes as long as three or four minutes, and the effect is galvanizing. He called it a "tragedy in long-shots," a reference to Chaplin's comment that, "Tragedy is in closeup, comedy in long-shots." At one point the two sit at opposite ends of a table, with a light in between them. Godard pans the camera back and forth, as if at a tennis match, from one fact to the other, the light going on and off intermittently. Although the camera does not always point to the person speaking.

Finally, the third act is on Capri, and the stunning Cinemascope takes the breath away (Godard gets a bite at the hand that feeds him, by having Lang say, "Cinemascope is not for people. It's for snakes and funerals.") He makes excellent use of the Casa Malaparte, a burnt-orange house that rests atop a cliff jutting out to the sea, with a wedge-shaped staircase running from ground-level to the roof.

In Capri, Bardot will break with Piccoli and go to Palance. We get the beautiful shot of their parting, with her swimming away, Piccoli seated on the rugged shoreline. She and Palace will come to a bad end, though, dying in a traffic accident. Godard chooses not to show the accident, only the aftermath, where the two are posed in the car, which is wedged between the wheels of a tanker truck, like a photograph by Cindy Sherman.

Contempt is such a feast for the eyes that it can take more than one viewing to appreciate all that it has to offer. Consider the Lumiere quotation that is on the wall in the Cinecitta screening room: "Cinema is an invention with no future." Or the movie posters that line the walls on the studio streetfront: Psycho, Hatari, and Godard's own Vivre Sa Vie, which is itself about prostitution.

Where the film is most mischievous is its use of Bardot. She was the reason the film was able to be made, though her salary was half of the film's budget. The producers insisted on her doing nude scenes, and Godard obliged, but the sex is intellectual in nature (though it certainly stokes my libido). An early scene has Bardot and Piccoli lounging in bed, her magnificent derriere naked for the world to see. She asks him if he loves her various body parts--feet, ankles, knees, thighs, and so is reduced to a litany of parts, not a complete person. In the apartment scene, even while she's telling him how contemptuous she is of him, she is photographed like a Playboy centerfold model, slipping into a black bob wig (perhaps a reference to the contemporary film Cleopatra), stalking through the rooms wearing only a towel. Godard puts her in a bathtub, but she is reading a book of film criticism about Lang. Later, on the roof of the Casa Malaparte on Capri, she sunbathes nude, but a paperbook book is strategically placed on her bottom. Godard gave them nudity, but the sex is on his terms.

I've got a lot of Godard films yet to watch, but it would be hard to top Contempt as his greatest technical achievement, a film of great beauty, mystery, and intellect.