Looking through Jean-Luc Godard’s work, there’s generally a division between his more romantic and playful films, titles like Breathless, Band of Outsiders and A Woman is a Woman, and his serious and ponderous films, such as Alphaville and Film Socialisme. Contempt exists in a realm between the two, oscillating back and forth between a romance story and an esoteric story about making a film.
The romance is the last death throes of a marriage as Camille Javal (Bridgette Bardot) decides she no longer loves her husband Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli). It’s similar in conflict to A Woman is a Woman, but taken to a more desperate ends as the very fabric of their relationship begins to unwind.
Framing this entire relationship is the attempt to film a version of The Odyssey. The film is being directed by Fritz Lang, who amusingly shrugs off the constant complaints of American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). As the creative differences in making the film emerge, Godard attempts to construct a conversation about the relationship between gods and men.
While the two stories do overlap in a direct way, there’s starkly different in style. The long, drawn-out relationship scenes pad out the middle while this beginning and ending of the movie consists of montages and intellectual ponderings. The film is never able to connect the two, either in terms of style or content. The film stretches for a connection between Odysseus and Paul, but it’s a tenuous connection at best.
The finest moment of the film, a brief glimmer of synthesis between the two stories, is when the couple in voiceover muse over the nature of their relationship. It plays over a montage where Paul is shown as still having an intimate desire for his wife but one where Camille only sees herself growing distant. It’s a brief glimmer, a scene that could help reframe Contempt and get it back on track, but it quickly subsides back into the drawn out, placid story of the relationship.
It’s a shame because Contempt does have a strong visual style to it. The use of filters and the stark, brazen colors on the set design give the film an abrasive, flamboyant feel that fits at least the moviemaking story in the film. There are also some fantastic locales and arresting visits shot on location in Italy.
Contempt is the result of Godard exploring where he wants to go in the future. A lot of his styles, both past and future, are captured in the film and he’s not sure which one to stick with. Both sections of the film work, but they’re never cohesive or part of a satisfying whole, just two styles Godard has done much, much better before.
© 2012 James Blake Ewing
4 Comments
I agree that this is certainly not his best but I did like it a lot, if for anything Fritz Lang’s cameo and Bridget Bardot’s nude flesh.
I did enjoy the film, but it didn’t strike me as nearly as compelling as his finest works. In fact, I’m not quite sure I understood what he was trying to do with the film.
Well, I can see you might have a legitimate argument going here about the thematic tension, which you find to be unresolved and jangling (Lindsey Anderson, a famous John Ford fanatic, could never reconcile himself to “The Searchers” for reasons somewhat akin, arguing haplessly that everybody else was just getting it wrong).
But– though it has been a decade since I’ve seen it, I certainly was in the camp of “best artwork of postwar Europe” fans. Well, “more or less”, since there are a few Visconti, Tarkovsky, and–Godard–films that could qualify.
I will have to see it again, finally, but even the though of it is draining, because of what I experienced as its murderous emotional and aesthetic intensity. This is like the ur-Bertolucci movie, a movie out of which all of Bertolucci (at his best, so very brilliant) is already anticipated and even exhausted: a film of which “The Sheltering Sky” and “Last Tango in Paris” could be said to be brilliant commentaries, in theme and cinematic vision.
It’s a kind of avant garde narrative– a “real” narrative, even if in Godardian terms– a kind of one-off that shows how dazzlingly Godard could do this thing. Once, and then–
Back to being “pure” Godard! I can see how that alone might cast skepticism upon “Le Mepris”‘s achievement for some people, even if they feel something of its affective power already. Yet it is “pure” Godard– just another kind of it.
Granted, even I might hold up “Passion”, say, or who knows what as an *ultimate* Godard film, so various is his achievement. And for the moment at least, I agree with you (after a single viewing) that “Film Socialisme” is difficult and not-what-I-want it to be.
If you haven’t seen “The Sheltering Sky”, I would recommend seeing that (sometime when you don’t mind something alienating and painful) and perhaps from that giving Le Mepris another try someday. The Bertolucci film (I’ve read the book too in this case; but for my part, I think you can reasonably take the film on its own merits) is on the same wavelength where both marriage and intricate cinematic aestheticism– the total engagement in choreographic crane shots pushing the medium to a symphonic breaking point– are the auteur’s obsessions. A symphony of dissolution. I do think, at least, Bertolucci must have “Contempt” (the source novel was written by the guy who wrote “The Conformist”s source too– crap, I’ll have to goggle, can’t think of the name!) very deep down in his filmmaking mind.
I see this as a bridge between two different Godards, and I can see his notion of “true” narrative in this film, a notion I don’t agree with him. I like movies from both different sensibilities a lot, and I certainly think this is the best representation of Godard’s career, but I think he made a lot of films around this time that worked much better.