Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
Jean-Luc
Godard, the most-analyzed, dissected and critiqued auteur
of his generation makes his grand statement on the compromises
and sell-outs required by salope déesse cinema
with “Contempt,” his biggest-ever hit, a movie
about making movies.
The
critic turned cinematic revolutionary pretty much says
it all with his film’s title (“Le mépris)
in French). “Contempt” positively swims in
Godard’s disdain for artistic compromise in “the
movie business,” as well as theoretical maxims about
the “reality” of cinema and of film reflecting
or perverting life.
The
film boasts the novelty of featuring Fritz Lang as himself,
a great German director making an American production
of “The Odyssey” in Italy with an Italian
crew and a French crime novelist/playwright and screenwriter
all in service of 
an
obnoxious, oversexed and hammy Hollywood producer, played
by future Oscar winner Jack Palance.
But the reasons for “Contempt’s” success
remain as obvious as the film’s bare-bottomed opening.
The
scene, a writer (Michel Piccoli) and his wife (Brigitte
Bardot) discuss their relationship, post coitus, in their
marriage bed. Bardot is nude throughout it. It’s
not her only nude scene in the film. Once, we drop in
on her sunbathing on the Isle of Capri with a copy of
a book on Fritz Lang’s cinema draped across her
butt.
Cute.
So
that was the film’s obvious “appeal”
back then. How does it play, now? More than a little dated
and a tad ponderously, I have to say.
“Do
you see my behind in the mirror,” Camille coyly
teases (in French with English subtitles)? “Do you
think I have a pretty bottom?”
What,
is he blind?
Writer
Paul is besotted to an “I love you completely, tenderly
and tragically” degree. Camille is out of his league,
out of most every man’s league. “Contempt”
is about that rewrite offer on “The Odyssey”
and what Paul will do to keep his gorgeous wife happy.
Or
at least, that’s how braying, posing producer Jeremy
Prokosch (Palance) sees it. Paul, who can’t be that
much of an idealist, seeing how he got his start writing
pulp crime novels, will take that $10,000 offer.
“You
have a very beautiful wife,” Prokosch oozes. “You
need the money.”
They
watch the pretentious dailies legendary director Lang
has filmed, with the producer, Lang, Paul, Camille and
the Italian personal assistant/translator (Giorgia Moll)
who communicates between the American, the German, the
French folk and the Italian crew. Who will Paul listen
to as he sets out to rethink this screenplay that Lang
is turning into montages of Greek statues, art and “culture?”
It’s
the LA hustler who just sold the troubled Italian studio
backlot, the one who snaps “Whenever I hear the
word ‘culture’ I break out my checkbook.”
Prokosh
wants more sex, more Odysseus/Ulyssees temptations, more
sexual heat in the wandering soldier and sailor’s
return to his beloved Penelope. But is that the point
of The Odyssey, that homecoming? Maybe generations
of readers have got it wrong, Prokosch suggests in his
most gauche moment. Maybe the guy was in no hurry to “hurry”
home from the Trojan War.
Lang is dismayed. Paul hesitates, and then runs with it
as the oily producer throws other ideas out there.
“I
found a book of Roman paintings that I think would help
with ‘The Odyssey.'”
“‘The
Odyssey’ is Greek,” Paul protests.
When
he opens the book later, Paul realizes it’s of ancient
Roman porn. And when he tries to praise Lang’s already-filmed
footage, shot in Cinemascope, the old man draws his line
in the sand.
“It
wasn’t made for man,” the director of “M,”
“Metropolis,” “The Big Heat” and
“Rancho Notorious” mutters of the popular
widescreen filming process. “It was made for snakes
and funerals!”
Camille
isn’t just a bystander in all this. We see her growing
“contempt” for the man she married, even if
this sell-out means they’ll be able to pay off their
posh, sleek mid-century-modern apartment.
As
Paul tries to please and appease her — she spies
him swatting the bottom of Francesca the personal assistant
— and Camille fends off the advances of the predatory
producer, can this marriage be saved? Even by a long,
tortured afternoon-long debate back in their apartment
about whether they should leave for Capri with the producer
to watch the filming, and rewrite that script to his tastes,
or bail?
Whatever
Godard was saying about the arch artificiality of the
cinema and the banality of “real life,” that
opening scene with the great French sex symbol of her
era nude was added to the picture after most filming was
done — at the insistence of the producers.
That’s as on-the-nose as “life-imitates-cinema”
gets.
The
opening credits are recited by Godard over footage of
a film being shot on a backlot. And when the movie proper
begins after those four minutes of nude conversation,
the shooting strategy reverts to form.
Paul,
summoned to a meeting with this grandiose, theatrical
producer, is led through an empty, overgrown backlot,
street scene repaintings interrupted, a newly-sold s (Cinecittà
Studios) will make way for tacky redevelopment, Prokosch
rages.
That
lays out the central debate within the film. Do you let
artists be artistes, or do the Philistine producers and
bean-counters control the art and the number of nude scenes
they figure it’ll take to sell this sometimes scenic,
always melodramatic talkathon?
“Contempt”
has long been regarded as a cinephile’s comedy,
and there’s humor in Lang’s bemused sangfroid
over the state of the cinema. Palance, hurling film reels,
throwing his arms up in “Evita!” salutes of
despair, is worth a histroinic laugh or two. Prokosh’s
power play to finish their conversation has him climbing
into his Alfa Romeo Spider to zip to the spot they’ll
make their deal, forcing Paul to literally wade through
weeds, led by the apologetic Francesca, to cover the same
30 or so meters.
But
that long husband/wife end-of-first-act argument after
Camille has been brought along to experience this world
is stiff and stagebound, punctuated with Camile trotting
out a brunette wig as if to dampen the ardor of the producer
she thinks her husband is practically pimping her out
to in order to get this job and more like it.
Godard’s
infamous sexism isn’t just on display in all the
nudity included here. Paul slaps his wife to win an argument
(he doesn’t). He smokes cigars and never takes off
his hat because he wants to look like Dean Martin in “Some
Came Running.” Paul’s an “ass”
who takes up the Italian-trademarked pat on women’s
bottoms privilege.
As
Camille has agency and is the most important element of
this storyline the most charitable way of interpreting
that is that this is a sexist commenting on sexism in
cinema and the “possession” of women in the
real world, and in the cinema at the opening of the “liberated”
1960s.
The
performances are good, with Bardot the stand-out and Palance
the scenery chewer.The
filmmaker broadened the world’s notion of how a
film should sound, with music used sparingly, boom microphones
capturing the echoey emptiness of the back lot and its
empty interiors, and close-miking reserved mainly for
more intimate conversations.
Casa Malaparte and the waters off the Isle of Capri lend
the picture a moment-in-time scenic touch, and the “La
Dolce Vita” era car, clothes, hairstyles and furnishings
that would later be labeled “mid century modern”
give “Contempt” historic resonance.
But
the central conflict is a melodramatic trope that works
better when the stakes are “The Postman Always Rings
Twice” or “Double Indemnity” higher.
The debate between art and commerce plays as very ’60s.
And Truffaut’s “Day for Night” and heck,
Richard Rush’s “The Stunt Man” were
more entertaining movies about making movies.
“Contempt”
is more slow-moving proof that film buffs were more patient
in the ’60s than they were in earlier eras, or in
the decades since. While there are ’60s “art”
films that I couldn’t bear to sit through again
(“Last Year at Marienbad,” etc.), “Contempt”
never quite settles into that self-conscious quicksand.
It’s too cool for that.
But
I’d say it’s best appreciated today for its
impact on the budding auteurs who grew up on it, the cinephiles
it converted to the True Faith and the generations of
Bardot worshippers who carried that torch until she retired,
a movie that taught us all that the rich guy with the
Alfa Romeo convertible always gets the blonde, or seems
to, unless he has an accident.
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