Le Mépris (1963)
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard

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.

Film Synopsis

Paul Javal, a crime fiction writer, is engaged by the American film producer Jeremy Prokosch to re-write a film about Homer's Odyssey.  Prokosch is at odds with his director, Fritz Lang, who wants to capture the glory and realism of Greek antiquity, whilst Prokosch is after a film that will simply make big bucks.  Javal agrees to take on the work but soon discovers that his wife, Camille, has begun to despise him for the ease with which he is prepared to compromise his ideals.  Javal once saw himself as a great playwright and now he is nothing more than a hack script doctor, willing to sell his soul for a large cheque...