Film Review
'C'est un film simple sur des choses compliquées' - this is how
director Jean-Luc Godard once described
Le Mépris, a film that,
despite its apparent simplicity and conventional form, has come to be
regarded as one of the most important pieces of cinema art of the
twentieth century.
Not only was
Le
Mépris Godard's most commercially successful film, it is
also (arguably) his most profound, the one in which Godard makes his
clearest statement about what cinema should be. This is a film
that operates at many levels and serves both as a haunting meditation
on life and a scathing critique of the filmmaking industry.
Whereas much of Godard's cinema is extremely challenging and often very
difficult to engage with,
Le
Mépris is a film that is astonishingly easy to fall in
love with. In narrative and technical terms, it is the simplest
of Godard's films, but this simplicity is only skin-deep. Beneath
its alluring glossy surface, there is as much depth and complexity as
you could wish for.
Le Mépris begins with a
quote from the critic André Bazin: "Cinema substitutes the real
world for one that accords with our desires." This provides the
first clue as to what the film is about: the conflict between truth and
expediency, both in life and in art. In the film, this conflict
is represented by the central character, Paul Javal, an established
crime writer who is torn between being a serious playwright and a
Hollywood hack screenwriter. In a perfect world, Javal
would follow the example of Fritz Lang, a free-spirited auteur who only
makes films that interest him, heedless of the need to turn a
profit. (Lang is played by himself, the legendary Austrian
filmmaker and author of such classics as
M (1931),
Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)
and
Metropolis (1927).
In the real world, he ends up selling his services to a
crass American film producer, Jeremy Prokosch, whose only concern is to
make as much money as he can. Javal is hired to rewrite Lang's
latest film, a modern reinterpretation of Homer's
The Odyssey, but in doing so he
arouses his wife's contempt and ends up losing both his artistic
integrity and his marriage. Compromise should be the eighth
deadly sin.
Javal's dilemma is one that Godard may himself have been wrestling with
at the time - you either prostitute your intellect so that you can live
the easy life of fame and fortune, or you must plough your own furrow
and accept the privations that this entails. Prior to
Le Mépris, Godard had made
half a dozen films, most of which, whilst auteur pieces, flirted with
the mainstream by employing charismatic actors who were well on the way
to international stardom (Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Anna Karina
and Jean-Claude Brialy). These include
À bout de souffle (1960)
and
Une femme est une femme (1961).
Le Mépris represents something of a turning point for
Godard, a final concession to mainstream cinema. After this, he
would become increasingly concerned with pursuing his own artistic
vision and become ever less mindful of the trifling exigencies of his
producers and distributors.
It can be argued that making
Le
Mépris was the biggest compromise of Godard's entire
career. The film's American producers foisted Brigitte Bardot on
him, hoping to capitalise on the burgeoning popularity of cinema's
latest sex goddess. When Godard delivered them a first cut of the
film in which Bardot was seen fully clothed throughout, the producers
were outraged and insisted that additional sequences be included with
the actress arrayed only in the suit that nature had equipped her
with.
The memorable opening sequence of
Le Mépris, in which Bardot
lies naked on her bed
playfully
conversing with Michel Piccoli
, was
a last minute addition, but it works incredibly well to the film's
advantage. Not only does the scene establish the intimacy of the
main characters Javal and Camille (and thereby render their subsequent
marital breakdown all the more poignant), it also underscores the main
point of the film, succinctly summed up in Bazin's quote. Godard
was himself prevented from making the film he had intended because his
producers had other ideas and the power to override him; there is a
delicious irony in the fact the producers' interference should
strengthen the point he is making. Without Bardot's (tasteful)
nude scene
Le Mépris
would lose much of its poetry and emotional impact.
Le Mépris may appear to
be an original story but it is in fact based on a novel by Alberto
Moravia entitled
Il Disprezzo
(
A Ghost at Noon), which is
about a disintegrating marriage. It is the classic Italian
melodrama, but Godard takes it and fashions it into something far more
substantial, making it a bleak commentary on the hazards of married
life and filmmaking. The crumbling relationship of a writer and
his wife is a metaphor for the artist's failure to hold onto his
integrity when faced with an easier route to success. The
producer Prokosch and director Lang (respectively played by Jack
Palance and Fritz Lang himself) are the two opposing poles between
which the writer Javal is caught - Prokosch represents all that is
tacky and shallow in modern cinema, Lang is an auteur of the old school
who is not prepared to make the slightest concession to the money
men. Javal may want to be like Lang, but he is too much of a
materialist - he has an apartment to pay for and a wife to impress, so
he sells himself to Prokosch and makes himself an intellectual
prostitute. Worse that that, he manoeuvres his wife Camille in
Prokosch's direction, using her as a honey trap to further his own
career. Javel's failure to understand why Camille is upset by all
this triggers an immediate breakdown in their relationship, and so he
loses not only his integrity but also his wife through his willingness
to compromise his art and his marriage.
At the time Godard was making
Le
Mépris, his own marriage to Anna Karina was in desperate
straits (the couple divorced two years later). It is therefore
inevitable that we should read an autobiographical strand into the
film, particularly when Brigitte Bardot puts on a Karina-like black wig
in the crucial apartment scene in which Javal and Camille discover that
their relationship is in a state of terminal decline. Karina had
been Godard's muse for most of his early films so their impending
separation must have had a profound impact on the director. This
could explain why the extended apartment sequence is one of the most
memorable and most authentic in Godard's entire oeuvre, showing Godard
less as the cold intellectual and more as a sensitive and vulnerable
human being. The enormity of the rift between Javal and Camille
is revealed, subtly but with devastating impact, in the inspired shot
in which the camera pans back and forth between the two of them,
separated by a lamp that flashes on and off like a warning
beacon. There is no going back, no prospect of
reconciliation. Javal has gambled on his future success and has
failed. The inability of Javal and Camille to connect echoes one
of the main themes of Godard's early work, the apparent incompatability
of the sexes. This is also a central feature of
À
bout de souffle (1960) and
Pierrot
le fou (1965) - note that in each of these three films the
communication breakdown is ultimately resolved by the horrifically
brutal death of one of the protagonists - the death of a relationship
must be consummated by the death of a character. In real life, of
course, things are much messier.
One of the main strengths of
Le
Mépris is its pitch-perfect casting of the four
principals. Of these, only Michel Piccoli looks as if he is
acting; the other three - Jack Palance, Brigitte Bardot and Fritz Lang
- are to a very large extent just playing themselves. Rather than
hire three actors who must meld themselves into the parts he has
created, Godard makes use of three people who are already the living
embodiment of his characters - the brash egoist (Palance), the
inscrutable, unattainable object of desire (Bardot) and the committed auteur
(Lang). In doing so, he seems to accord with Lang's view of how
the ancients lived, enjoying a more harmonious relationship with the
natural world than we do today by living with it rather than by seeking
to change it.
Another important contributor to the film is Godard's faithful
cinematographer Raoul Coutard.
Le
Mépris contains some of Coutard's finest work and it is
hard not to be completely mesmerised by the sheer beauty of his
photography of the exotic locations (Cinecittà studios in Italy
and the island of Capri, both blisteringly redolent of the ancient
world). Georges Delerue's intensely lyrical score injects further
poignancy into Coutard's spellbinding images, particularly the main
theme, which was inspired by Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, op.11
and is so intensely charged with a tragic sense of loss. Martin
Scorsese, a fan of
Le Mépris,
was minded to re-use the theme in his 1995 film
Casino.
The film within the film, Lang's bizarre visualisation of Homer's
The Odyssey (complete with mermaids
and red-eyed statues) strangely parallels the fortunes of the three
main protagonists. Javal, Prokosch and Camille are the modern
equivalents of Odysseus, Poseidon and Penelope, all represented by
imposing stone statues that somehow manage to have more vitality
than their living counterparts. Godard makes the
point that we are apt to impose our own experiences (and/or cultural
ignorance) on the great works of the past. Whilst Prokosch is
more than willing to rewrite Homer's poem, recasting Penelope as an
unfaithful wife, Javal is increasingly convinced that Odysseus delayed
his return home because of his wife's contempt for him. Only
Lang, the unsullied artist, is able to remain true to Homer's original
work and in the end he wins through, as nothing will induce him to
compromise his art. And so it would be for Godard from this point
on - the recalcitrant auteur (humorously tagging along as Lang's
assistant in the film) has at last found his voice. ('
Silenzio!' he cries, right at the
end of the film.) There would be no big Hollywood pay cheques
coming his way, no patronage from Poseidon-like film moguls.
Godard's own odyssey was just beginning, and Penelope could take care
of herself.
© James Travers 2012
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Next Jean-Luc Godard film:
Le Petit soldat (1963)