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?
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