Movie Review – Contempt

Contempt (1963)
Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

In doing a film series spotlighting Movies About Movies, there’s no way we could exclude Contempt from this list. Filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard were lovers & critics of the medium first before they exploded the form and sent cinema hurtling down a magnificent track for about 20-30 years or so. Godard was a profoundly complicated person, and I think he was likely neurodivergent, or at least his work was inspired by a neurodivergent perspective. There’s an intense focus on what most people might see as unimportant or the constant repetitive movements or behaviors of people.

Godard deconstructs human interaction and examines it like you might dissect a living creature to learn about it. There’s a lot of emotion in his work but, at the same time, a sense of detachment. Contempt is a significant shift in the looser work he had made his name on. It’s a film that drops into your lap with weight and forces you to contend with the characters and their poor decisions.

Paul (Michel Piccoli) is a French playwright working in Rome when he gets called in to rewrite a script for an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey. The picture is directed by iconic director Fritz Lang (as himself) and produced by a brash, opinionated American, Jeremy (Jack Palance). Paul convinces his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot), to tag along when he visits the studio on the first day.

After Paul agrees to work on the picture, Jeremy invites everyone to his villa to celebrate. There’s room for only two people, and Paul is agreeable, telling Camille to go with Jeremy and he’ll catch up with them. Camille is clearly not comfortable with this but submits. Paul is delayed and shows up thirty minutes late. His wife is visibly uncomfortable, but he plays it off as just her moodiness. Eventually, Camille reveals what she thinks is going on: she believes Paul sees her as something he can hand to Jeremy temporarily to cement this deal and propel him forward in his career. 

This was a big deal at the time because Godard would shoot in Cinemascope, the spectacle we now associate with formats like IMAX. Most of his work up to this point had been handheld and very intimate. This promised to be something more significant in scope. However, Godard’s story is profoundly personal; it carries the bold colors and sweeping aspect ratio of an “epic” picture. The director refuses to compromise what he likes about cinema to appeal to a mass audience, a potentially alienating decision, but it works beautifully. Why shouldn’t something like a French New Wave film look the same as Cleopatra or Spartacus? It is undoubtedly a fascinating juxtaposition of styles. Despite its numerous filming problems, you cannot see an ounce of that in the final product. It is perfect.

Contempt is composed of three clear parts: The studio/villa, back home with the couple, and on set. It’s this second portion with Piccoli and Bardot as the only people on camera where the picture comes alive. Godard spent a tremendous amount of time planning the blocking of these shots, the camera’s movements, and the actors’ poses. While this sequence was shot over days or possibly weeks, that’s never felt. The continuity is seamless so that the audience feels present on a lazy afternoon in this apartment, eavesdropping on a couple whose marriage is at a precarious point. Godard was feeling estranged from his wife and frequent star Anna Karina at the time. I wouldn’t doubt that affected things on set.

During this middle part, it becomes clear Paul has avoided talking about certain aspects of their relationship, and Camille is reaching a boiling point. There’s beautiful choreography to this argument. They both argue and then retreat to corners of the apartment; the other pursues and goes deeper into the conflict. By the end, some very uncomfortable things are lying on the table, and no resolution has been reached. They know that going to this place doesn’t mean good things for the future of their marriage, but their relationship has no chance of staying afloat if they don’t talk about it. 

The final sequence, set at Casa Malaparte, is visually stunning and brings us to a conclusion worthy of the epic poem being adapted into a film. Malaparte is a house on the island of Capri conceived in 1937 by architect Adalberto Libera. It is a red stone box with reverse pyramidal stairs that lead to a roof patio. The only way to access this precariously placed structure is by foot from the town of Capri along a staircase cut into the cliffside or by boat.

Such a location immediately evokes images of Mayan temples and the idea of sacrifice at its peak. A metaphorical human sacrifice occurs here, a moment where Paul ascends to find Camille there with Jeremy, played as a doppelganger to him arriving at the villa. This time, Paul is full of suspicions about his wife, forgetting he was the one who started this chain of events in the first place.

Godard does an excellent job of blending the realism of a marriage with the mythic elements of the Odyssey. The marital strife certainly fits that. Images of classical Greek statuary are intercut as part of transitions. Bold colors and clothing styled like togas push the film into more abstract, expressionistic modes. It’s the perfect blend of substance and spectacle, a visually rich cinematic experience that also speaks to themes of emotion & humanity. Language plays a big part as we have characters who speak a whole host of them, relying on a single interpreter to make sense of it all.

What is most evident to me is how Godard was a consumer and processor of cinema. He was a person reborn in the movie theater who could take the shorthand language of the medium and repurpose it repeatedly in surprising ways. He was not limited in any regard but would always present you with something you never expected yet felt familiar. Bardot is shown as a beautiful nude woman in her very first scene (what audiences expected based on her previous work) but then spends most of the film pushing back against the concept of her as pure sex. She refuses to be Paul’s trophy, and he never seems to understand her. Like all great Greek plays, this is yet another tragedy.