danger on the rocks, marriage on the rocks
Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris) is back in theaters, an often oppressive film to match the oppressive heat wave we’re having. The French producer/distributor StudioCanal gives us a newly restored 4K version “from the original 35mm negative, interpositive, and reference print by [cinematographer] Raoul Coutard,” to help celebrate its 60th anniversary. Sadly, the better Contempt looks — and it always looked phenomenal — the more deathly dull the narrative action feels. I rate it last among the major Godard releases.
Every time this movie is restored, we get an increasingly great divide between (a) the sheer generosity of its voluptuous colors, striking vistas, visual humor, and (b) the tedium of its psychodrama, the grinding gears of a marriage between two sticks-in-the-mud stuck in the mud.
Godard was like his contemporary Andy Warhol: both men the central and inextricable fireballs of their massive social solar systems, but klutzy interpersonally. And similar to the imagery-obsessed Warhol, Godard’s sense of relationality was at its best when it trained on ideas and texts and histories and pop, and sometimes fumbled in moments of sincerity when people were the subject: vibrating meatsacks of quotidian quirks, instead of whole-cloth archetypes in false eyelashes. If anything, Warhol as an experimental filmmaker found this latent humanism solely by running the Bolex and then staying out of further directorial intervention, and the Factory screen tests and ephemeral intimacies like Blow Job (1964) have an odd tenderness. Hands-off wouldn’t have worked with Godard, who was all intervention.
Itself a somewhat compromised vision and loose adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel Il disprezzo, the frame story of Godard’s Contempt deals with adaptation and compromise in the Cinecittà/Hollywood studio megalopolis. In real life, Godard had recently broken through internationally with the epochal Breathless (1960) and married Anna Karina, the actress-muse from his three other pre-Contempt features, and their partnership was one of tumult.
The dual preoccupations of Contempt naturally end up intertwined, as they do in many a mise-en-abyme. There’s the creative differences between a flailing old-Hollywood epic-bombast moviemaking ethos (an arrogant American producer played by Jack Palance) and an artier European approach, and Fritz Lang (playing himself) as the veteran auteur who has made peace with becoming an aging director-for-hire on Palance’s shitshow, a new take on The Odyssey.
And in hashing out flimsy theories of Homeric protags Ulysses and Penelope’s secretly toxic romance and mutual disgust, Contempt is on-the-nose in mirroring the disintegrating marriage of its two principals. To wit: a Godard stand-in screenwriter (Michel Piccoli, donning a very Jean-Luc hat) and his bored, distant wife (Brigitte Bardot), canonically considered the Karina stand-in, especially as in a few scenes she wears a styled-bob black wig quite similar to Karina’s Vivre Sa Vie hair. Speaking as a viewer, the wig also serves to break up the stifling monotony of Bardot’s proto-Lana terminal ennui, and the looping neurotic bitterness of her Ulysses-surrogate husband, and how I wish the danger on the rocks would hurry up and consume everyone but poor sweet Fritz Lang.
Contempt is cleverest when the references are at the forefront. Vivre Sa Vie also shows up in my favorite shot of the movie, as a poster (Italian title: Questa è la mia vita) hung next to one for Howard Hawks’s “John Wayne leads an expedition of white game-hunters in Africa” Technicolor blockbuster Hatari! (1962). Idling in front of these tableaux is Jack Palance’s producer character and his Alfa Romeo, small and sporty but red in a way that suggests hot tempers and tumescence and sunburns. And, conversely, little red books (there’s one here, lots more in La Chinoise). Layers upon layers! If Hatari! is Americans play-colonizing what’s now Tanzania, Palance is the Hollywood arriviste who smells money in the nouvelle and the nuova. It’s prescient: by 1964, a couple of U.S. screenwriters who had loved the cinema coming out of France managed to get Godard and his frenemy François Truffaut onboard during the development stages of what would become Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967).
“Hatari,” as it happens, is Swahili for “danger,” and maybe Godard is throwing us a “Chekhov’s gun” for what’s to follow, and expecting his savvy audience to be aware of Ulysses’s many perils in The Odyssey. The sirens! The cyclops! Danger and The Odyssey are so synonymous that a 2015 work about James Joyce’s monolithic modernist redux Ulysses was titled The Most Dangerous Book. In Contempt, it culminates during the third act at and around a villa in Capri, a location that looms heavy as a source of disinterest or mild dread in the tentative touch-and-go conversations back in the couple’s home base of Rome. Neither particularly wants to go.
It’s funny, the section of the film that actually takes place in Capri is shorter than I’d remembered; that a highly anticipated and pivotal chunk courts the desultory isn’t necessarily a criticism in the Godardiverse, in which a perceived denouement can turn out to be a Trojan horse. The villa, Casa Malaparte, is such an iconic piece of the Contempt mythos, as much The Thing People Know From It as Bardot’s nude ass is. But it’s primarily there so the expected beat can exist, for the seductive corals and canary yellows, the Hitchcock-noir steep steps and high heights and jagged outcroppings and Dutch angles and the morbid lure of water, and I presume because Godard liked that its titular first occupant Curzio Malaparte was a self-described Maoist (and fascist, and other stuff). It’s there to give the Odyssey film crew an excuse to tell us, again shamelessly on the nose, about the hero gazing across the sea toward Ithaca, a/k/a “home,” a/k/a the end, or if not thee end then an end. A gleam on a tine on a fork in a road.
It’s to Godard’s credit that he wasn’t going to leave us with a fucking gaze. He knew how to snuff a movie out. I fear that even as gorgeous and conceptually rich as Contempt can be, I’m grateful for the mercy killing.
