Blast from the past

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt is the film of the summer

by Jeffrey Gantz

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Adapted by Godard from the novel Il disprezzo, by Alberto Moravia. With Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, and Giorgia Moll. A Strand/Rialto Pictures re-release. Opens at the Avon on September 12.

This summer's best movie is . . . just about ready to celebrate its 35th birthday. You can't knock its credentials: it's directed by one of the most intellectual and notoriously controversial filmmakers in the history of the medium, and it stars the cinema's most famous sex symbol this side of Marilyn Monroe. You could worry that the director -- Jean-Luc Godard, who's not just intellectual and notoriously controversial but also perverse -- might decide to display himself naked while shooting the sex symbol -- Brigitte Bardot -- fully dressed and reading from Chairman Mao. Godard does in fact appear in the film, but he keeps his clothes on; Bardot takes hers off on numerous occasions, but she also proves she can act. And Godard, glory be, proves he can tell a story.

First released in 1963, with Joe Levine, Carlo Ponti, and Georges de Beauregard as its producer triumvirate, Contempt has always been a "lost" Godard film, stranded between the naively charming efforts (Breathless, Une femme est une femme) that preceded it and the "fragmentation" essays (Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle, Made in USA) that followed. Godard aficionados regarded it as too commercial; those who went to ogle Bardot found it too serious. It is serious: Godard has filmed an excruciatingly painful story of an unraveling marriage that mirrors his own (to actress Anna Karina). Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) and his wife, Camille (Bardot -- whose real name is Camille Javal), are in Rome, where Paul has been offered a job rewriting some scenes for a film of the Odyssey that's being produced by Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) and directed by Fritz Lang (who plays himself). With considerable help from Jerry, Paul and Camille drift apart. Finally Camille goes off with Jerry.

In many Godard films, the actors appear to be taking dictation; they're extensions of the director. Contempt has great performances. Piccoli is tortured and wimpy (he's the Godard equivalent of François Truffaut's Jean-Pierre Léaud character), Bardot is sexy and intelligent, Jack Palance proves real men don't need fancy cologne. But it's still a Godard film -- which means Contempt is also dense with nuance and thought-provoking detail. Anyone can understand it in one viewing, but a second trip, or even a third, will give you a lot to ponder. Here are some thoughts for starters:

1) Whose film is it, anyway? For Paul and Camille, Godard wanted love American style: Frank Sinatra (whom he'd admired in Some Came Running) and Kim Novak (on the strength of her performance in Vertigo). Carlo Ponti countered with divorce Italian style: Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren (Carlo's wife). Eventually they wound up with Piccoli and Bardot.

2) Don't forget, this is a movie. As the opening credits are spoken, Godard shows us a camera rolling along tracks, following Jerry's interpreter/assistant, Francesca (Giorgia Moll), as she strolls while reading some papers. He's hoping that, by the end, we'll understand that this isn't his life he's putting up on screen but a movie version of his life.

3) Selling it. In a film he made the previous year, Vivre sa vie, Godard cast his wife as a prostitute. Here everyone's a prostitute. Fritz Lang has to limit his vision to what Hollywood can understand (just as in Lang's own life). Paul is doing rewrites for money. Jerry writes out Paul's check by making Francesca bend over so he can do it on her back; in the process he appears to be doing it to her. As for Camille, at one point Paul says, "I should have known better than to marry a 28-year-old typist," so you can draw your own conclusions as to why he married her.

4) Where did I go wrong? In the film's key scene, Jerry invites Paul and Camille back to his villa for a drink. But his red Alfa Romeo is a two-seater, so his proposal -- make that proposition -- is that Camille should come with him and Paul can follow in a cab. Paul, to Camille's dismay, accedes (maybe he's afraid the scriptwriting offer will be withdrawn). Camille, suggesting that the two of them get a cab and follow Jerry, gives her husband a second chance. He doesn't take it.

5) Picture that's worth a thousand words. Same scene: on the wall behind Jerry's car are two Italian film posters. One, off to the side, plugs Vivre sa vie. The other, centered, is for Hatari!, the 1962 Howard Hawks film. Hatari! stars John Wayne in his usual role as a straight shooter who knows what he ought to do and goes ahead and does it. In other words, the exact opposite of Paul. But, being a Hawks film, Hatari! is also about how men and women can't communicate -- particularly men (think of To Have and Have Not, or Rio Bravo, or Man's Favorite Sport?). John Wayne's character recovers in time. Paul doesn't. (Later on, Godard shows us a poster of Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia, another film in which a couple go to Italy and watch their marriage fall apart.)

6) Make up your mind. Jerry keeps asking Camille whether she'll come to watch the shooting on Capri, pointedly ignoring Paul. Camille answers that Paul makes the decisions. What she means is that she wants Paul to make the decisions. Instead, he keeps nagging her to say what she wants, or what she thinks they ought to do, since he himself has no idea; at one point he says, "You decide what I should do." Jerry, on the other hand, knows exactly what he wants. Camille knows exactly what Jerry wants too.

7) May I take your hat, sir? Paul wears his hat throughout the movie -- indoors, outdoors, in the bathtub, everywhere but in bed. He does this in hommage to Dean Martin in Some Came Running, but Camille reacts as if he were imitating Jerry Lewis. She wishes he'd stop trying to look like a movie-star hero and start acting like one.

8) Or maybe there's more enterprise in going naked . . . Bardot shows off her belle behind in more than one scene (Godard being as obsessed with the female body as he is with prostitution), but it wasn't enough for the American interests, who insisted on an opening nude love scene. Godard shot it through red, white, and blue filters (the French and American flags), and it reveals what's amiss straight off: Camille has to keep asking Paul whether he finds the various parts of her body beautiful. Both Camille and Paul spend more time looking at the pictures of nude lovemaking in a book they find at Jerry's than they spend looking at each other. Jerry, meanwhile, goes ga-ga over any opportunity to get some female nudity into his film. Which results in Paul's second horrific blunder. Everyone's gone to Capri, and just as the models are about to undress for a nude scene, Jerry invites Camille up to the house. She still wants Paul to claim her, but he tells her to go ahead while trying not to appear interested in the girls. He's not fooling anyone, least of all Camille.

9) Life imitates art. Jerry develops the idea that Odysseus tarries on his way home because he suspects that Penelope has been unfaithful, and anyhow, the Trojan War was just an excuse for men to get away from their wives (not a new idea -- just look at the dramatic output of Aeschylus). That's because Jerry doesn't understand what women are good for other than sex. Paul isn't much better off.

10) Who's directing who? Toward the end of Contempt, Godard himself appears as Fritz Lang's assistant director for the filming of the Odyssey. In Contempt itself, of course, Godard is Lang's director. Yet when Godard gave out the scripts, he told Lang he could change anything he didn't like. Lang made a few substitutions but kept the quotations from Dante and Hölderlin. You could say that Godard and Lang directed each other.

11) Letter to Anna. Many Godard films from the mid '60s, during which time his marriage was breaking up, are really letters to his wife: Vivre sa vie, Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, Made in USA -- all of which starred Anna Karina. In Contempt, Bardot sometimes wears a black wig styled like Karina's hairdo in Vivre sa vie. These films can end like threats: in two of them the Karina figure is killed, and in a third the Godard figure blows himself up. But on the road to marital disaster, you get some of the most laceratingly honest filmmaking in the history of the cinema. Here there's a single scene, in Paul and Camille's apartment, that lasts 30 minutes. You want to leave; you have to find out what happens. Just like real life.

12) How to watch this movie. Go early and go often. Remember, they don't make 'em like this anymore. n

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jgantz[a]phx.com.