Now she is sad, now she is happy, now she doesn’t care, now she loves him, now she hates him. In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Brigitte Bardot plays the tempestuous wife of a screenwriter hired to re-imagine The Odyssey for the big screen.
France
2*
Director:
Jean-Luc Godard
Screenwriter:
Jean-Luc Godard
Director of Photography:
Raoul Coutard
Running time: 100 minutes
Original title: Le mépris
Jean-Luc Godard’s début feature may have left its audience “breathless”, but his only (semi-)serious foray into big-budget cinema shows utter disregard for his audience. In the aptly titled Contempt, the director takes The Odyssey for a spin, but instead of channelling Homer, the film is sullied by Godard’s usual assortment of audiovisual gimmicks. In addition, the director’s personal business subsumes his art as Godard struggles to find a compelling way to express the toll his emotional life is taking on him.
In an opening scene that is far from titillating, Brigitte Bardot (or B.B., as she was known, which is also how the film refers to Bertolt Brecht) lies naked in bed. Her husband sits next to her, constantly reaffirming his devotion to her body when she inquires whether he likes her feet, ankles, knees, thighs and on and on. But while the scene starts with some sensual warm lighting, the lighting is shut off at some point to reveal the actors in natural (white) lighting, before it changes to cold blue lighting. It’s a cute visual metaphor for the development of the narrative, and yes, one can note the colours correspond to the French tricolour, but it is all a bit too on-the-nose to be effective.
Bardot plays Camille, a typist married to a French screenwriter named Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), and the seemingly happy couple is living in a new apartment in Rome. The action soon moves to the famed (but even in 1963 already dilapidated) Cinecittà Studios, where Paul has been summoned to assist on Odysseus. The movie is going off the rails, at least according to the film’s producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). He is a Hollywood bigshot who wants to wow audiences with the epic story of Ulysses’ journey back to his wife, Penelope. But having hired Fritz Lang, who has much more European ideas, he is furious with the eccentric direction of the film. Although Prokosch is a buffoon who gets visibly aroused by the sight of a mermaid onscreen, he does have a point: The rushes mostly just showcase some dreadfully boring close-ups of statues.
It is Paul’s job to make the screenplay accessible to a wider audience, and this is a job that could be very lucrative for him. After their meeting at the studio, Prokosch invites everyone to his villa. He has his eye on Camille, and to her everlasting shock and horror, her husband lets Prokosch get away with inviting her to accompany him in his sports car. From here on until close to the final credits, Camille is a passive-aggressive drama queen who never explains to Paul that she felt used but constantly gives him the evil eye while alternating between mocking indifference and theatrical hatred, like a volatile teenager.
If Camille were interesting or intelligent, that would be one thing, but while she may like to read a book about Fritz Lang in the bathtub, she also explains to a friend that Ulysses was “the guy who travels”. We have no backstory about the two, so when their relationship collapses very early in the film, the subsequent events cannot be compared with what came before. We don’t feel an absence of love, just the presence of a frustrating, festering drama. And a gnawing feeling that Godard had fought with his own wife while drafting the screenplay for this film and thought we should know all about it. For a large part of the film, Bardot wears the same black wig that Karina had worn in My Life to Live. (It wouldn’t be the last time Godard mixes business with personal heartache; La chinoise is notorious for featuring a domestic argument identical to one Godard had had with his girlfriend the night before the shoot.)
The story consists almost entirely of multiple scenes of tension on the domestic front, which are admirably directed but lead nowhere. Emotional development is also sorely lacking, particularly in the taciturn and exceedingly passive Paul. We are fed a ridiculous half-baked theory about Ulysses’ long-suffering wife, Penelope, not being faithful to him and Ulysses not really wanting to return to her – his epic quest to do just that notwithstanding.
Exactly as he did in A Woman is a Woman, Godard sometimes interrupts his own soundtrack to separate dialogue from diegetic music, making sure we notice that they do not overlap and are, in fact, just part of the film’s construction. At other times, the score by Georges Delerue is all-consuming and drowns out the dialogue with its sickly sweet orchestral numbers.
Perhaps the only visual number of note is a horizontal pan between the heads of the couple as they engage in a serious discussion. The film was shot in Cinemascope, which could easily have fit the two heads on opposite sides of the frame, but Godard’s approach here works because we become acutely aware of the gulf that separates them from each other.
Unfortunately, Contempt becomes captive to Camille as she wallows in unbearable self-pity. The behaviour is absolutely realistic, but the tedium increases the longer she persists. She never confides in anyone, she doesn’t share what she really thinks, and she doesn’t change. By the end of the film, when tragedy strikes, it is difficult not to burst out in applause. All the while, the only truly entertaining figure is Lang, who takes all the histrionics in his stride, presumably because he has seen divas like Camille on his sets his entire life.
The picture-postcard images of Capri in the film’s final act are among the most beautiful (and, therefore, the most unexpected) of Godard’s entire oeuvre. But because they frame a rotten relationship and not one (Odysseus) but two (also Contempt) failing movie productions, they become infected, too. The connection between Ulysses/Penelope and Paul/Camille is tenuous at best, and neither of the two relationships is fleshed out in any meaningful way. Godard is no Homer, nor Ulysses, nor Lang. Bardot has no range as an actress, and Palance overacts like a giant ham. These horrendous performances, along with Piccoli’s blank character (a stand-in for Godard) and the boring bits of narrative all work together to produce a terrible piece of cinema that no amount of pretty pictures or domestic squabbling can save.