The Magic Window

Contempt  (Le Mépris) • 1963 • Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

“The cinema is an invention without a future.” -- Louis Lumière, inventor of motion pictures
— written on the wall of the screening room in Contempt

Jean-Luc Godard is the original, and still reigning, tortured intellectual of the cinema. Deeply in love with the Classic Hollywood films of the 30s, 40s and 50s, yet disdainful and deeply ... contemptuous... of the philistine restrictions and lack of freedom of commercial filmmaking as only a French intellectual could be, Godard rarely became comfortable with his material in the manner of his Hollywood idols, and many of his best films are more easily enjoyed not as ‘movie movies’ but rather as joyful, sensual and hyperkinetic exercises in the sheer joy of filmmaking itself. In the way painters who love painting relish in the texture of the pigment and the brushstroke, we can almost see Godard fondling the film as he edits it himself (as he often has) using the Arriflex to make love to his actors, the scenery, the physical texture of the world, and the process itself as an end. Beneath the cool renegade posture, and all the self conscious artistry for its own sake, however, lay the heart of an unabashed romantic, and, though it may seem ‘uncool’ to say so, the films in which Godard gave free (or freer) reign to his love of emotional storytelling, and a more (relatively) conventional structure, became his finest films; including Breathless, Bande Apart (The Outsiders), Passion and, arguably his best, the ravishing Contempt.

If you're going to be alone in a vast and pitiless universe, it might as well be here...

Often dismissed as his ‘big budget’ ‘accessible’ film, Contempt, while certainly less maddeningly oblique and mystifying as the wacky, disturbing, and deliberately artificial Weekend, or as seemingly impenetrable as Hail Mary, is still hardly mainstream moviemaking. Composed of five or six long passages, or collections of related scenes, which while not actually in real time, are so deftly handled as to seem so, Contempt tells the story of semi-successful screenwriter Paul (Michel Piccoli), who, while settling into a new apartment in Rome with his complex and troubled wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot), is tempted into writing a Sword and Sandal version of The Odyssey for vulgar but charismatic producer Jerry (Jack Palance) who is desperately

Along with the rest of the cast, and most of the audience, Jack Palance can't take his eyes off Brigitte Bardot...

trying to head off the artier digressions of his director Fritz Lang (played by the great one himself) while attempting to lure Camille away from Paul. Along the way Paul commits an unpardonable crime of the heart, which we see as it happens, but which Paul is only able to begin to figure out as he starts to weave into his Odyssey script the threads of his own dissolving marriage.

Some things can't be undone; some looks can't be un-seen

"Every morning, to earn my bread, I go to the market where lies are sold... Full of hope, I get in line amongst the sellers” - Bertolt Brecht “On Hollywood”, quoted by Fritz Lang in Contempt

The Immortal Fritz Lang says goodbye to Hollywood in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt

Contempt was made in 1963, at the tail end of the first of the many roller coaster cycles in 60s-70s Italian popular moviemaking, Just three years earlier, La Dolce Vita was made at the height of the Peplum boom (Hercules and his hundreds of movie children), and derives much of its fizzy, jacked-up energy from a Rome that was riding high on one money making muscle-bound epic after another. A scant 3 years later, the epic fad was fading, (Paul’s one big success, we learn, was the Italian equivalent of The Three Stooges Meet Hercules) taking the Italian film industry into the first of several periodic depressions, and Contempt derives much of its melancholy from the deserted streets of Cinecitta, its sets and screening rooms decaying under the bright Roman sun. Godard seemed to be simultaneously bidding a heartsick farewell to the dying Hollywood of its glory days (and his youth), the grandeur of European filmmaking, and his fading initial faith in the power and hope of The New Wave. He was also beginning to say goodbye to his wife. (Though he and the gorgeous and talented Anna Karina stayed together for two more years, their marriage was already deeply troubled). It is the unwinding of Paul and Camille’s marriage that provides the emotional metaphor that seamlessly ties together what might have become another Godardian polemic into a deeply affecting whole that sweeps the viewer along with a power unequalled by Godard before or since. The ‘Chapters’ (briefly: the tender opening love scene; the protracted argument between Jerry, Paul and Lang about the heart of their Odyssey, the betrayal of Camille, the long, nightmarish confrontation between Camille and Paul in their apartment; and the spacey, tragic conclusion in Jerry’s villa on Capri) are punctuated by majestic, airy shots of ancient Greek statuary, as the Gods look down on the mortal downfalls playing out before them, appearing periodically like a mute Greek Chorus that speaks instead with the achingly beautiful music of the great Georges Delerue (Jules and Jim, Agnes of God, Platoon).

The Gods Look Down...

As we look up...

Georges Delerue was, in many ways, the French Ennio Morricone, a vastly prolific composer who enlivened and ennobled even the most mediocre material, and provided the emotional core of a handful of film classics; and, as Morricone’s score for Once Upon a Time in America is inseparably intertwined with the heart and pulse of that film, so Delerue’s elegaic, heartbreaking music is inextricably imbedded in Contempt, carrying its rhythms from passage to passage, act to act, uniting its multiple personal and cultural tragedies, and carrying us into the hearts of its often difficult and cynical characters.

The visual accompanist to Delerue’s symphonic requiem is the stunning photography of Raoul Coutard. At one point Lang, half-joking, says that Cinemascope is “suitable only for funerals and snakes”, but Godard and Coutard clearly revel in the widescreen saturated colour and brilliant clarity of their emotive vistas, and viewers who have only seen Contempt in its wretched, cropped tape and TV versions will be astonished by the revelatory beauty of this film, so long rendered grungy and cheap in its video incarnations, when seen in all its restored “Franscope” (a cheaper but no less stunning French knock-off of Cinemascope) glory. 

The final scenes in Capri are among the most extraordinarily beautiful ever captured on film; the hallucinatory blue of the sea, and razor sharp detail of stone, vegetation and architecture would be mindboggling as a travelogue; as the backdrop of this multilayered tragedy, they are as indelible and compelling as cinema ever gets.

“The Cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires...”
Andre Bazin, from Contempt

The heart of the film, however, is in its most intimate and difficult moments, in the long central section, in which we see a relationship disintegrate before our eyes in a matter of hours. Long, naturalistic, often improvised scenes can, and often have, seemed arch, artificial and ultimately tedious, in the New Wave, in Godard's lesser work, and certainly in the work of his legions of imitators; but here, what could have been pretentious and tiresome becomes almost unwatchably poignant and heartbreaking, as the passionate, quietly underplayed brilliance of Godard, Piccoli, and the oft-underrated Bardot delivers the most wrenching breakup this side of Scenes from a Marriage, as we see the pain of Godard’s own marriage being explored on the spot in the same way that Paul is using The Odyssey to understand his own predicament; revealing all the petty, irrational and irreparable ways human beings tend to self-destruct in the midst of their most powerful moments of love and passion. 

Marriage counseling, à la Française...

The smoldering focus of Bardot’s performance cannot be overstated; the laserlike anger and hurt at Contempt’s crucial moment of ‘betrayal’ is immediately clear to us, even as Paul cluelessly proceeds to seal his fate. Jack Palance on the other hand is, shall we say, unhampered by the need  for subtlety; but here, his larger than life intensity is perfectly channelled by Godard into the raucous embodiment of that callow indifference so many directors seem to bring out in so many producers, while still keeping Jerry three- dimensional: even in his crassest moments; Jerry, like Paul and Godard himself, also reveres the great gods of Hollywood, and Olympus.

In the end, this episodic film and its disparate “acts” are unified by three indelible images which express all the longing, sadness and hope of this farewell love letter to the power of dreams, of the Hollywoodian, artistic and personal varieties. All three are funeral-like in nature, but carry the whisper of hope that attends all deaths. Along about the middle of the film, as the two artists and their producer end their marathon of bickering, cajolery and manipulation, Fritz Lang emerges into the sunlight, accompanied by Delerue’s inexpressibly sad yet irresistably uplifting theme, and we seem to see the death of all that was best about the grand classic Hollywood era exiting before us. Yet Lang continued to make films long after he had permanently gone out of fashion, often potboilers very much like the film-within-a-film in Contempt, and his simple dignity and perserverance refuse to leave us with out hope. 

The Ending-Within-an-Ending of the Movie-Within-a-Movie....

The final shot of the film pans up to the placid stillness of the sea, in an echo of Ulysses’ futile journey, yet again, it seems to beckon us as well, to possibilities yet unspoken, bringing us ‘back’ to the ‘conclusion’ of the film, which, in true Godardian fashion is the first, great shot of the film: In lingering long shot, Godard follows a lone camera crew as they follow an actress down a deserted Roman street in a seemingly endless tracking shot.

One of the great Movie-Within-a-Movie shots of all time...

This too, seems funereal, yet as the film crew-within-a-film crew reaches us in closeup, Raoul Coutard (playing himself) swings his ‘scope camera down to focus on us, as if to say, as so many great artists have, “its all up to you now”.... 

It's all up to you now...

Up to us now, to keep alive the importance of art, of storytelling, of love, against all rational objection, in the face of all difficulty. It’s something Godard has done all his life, despite wild up-and-downswings in popularity, acceptance and fashion, and, against all odds, continues to do to this day. In the face of a film as surprising and wondrous as Contempt, we can do no less.  

There are undoubtedly better reasons to see Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt, but we can't think of one just now...