Contempt (Le Mepris)

Forty-five years later Godard’s masterpiece, “Contempt”, remains a startling visual stylization, majestically interweaving cool piercing intellect with surprising emotional breadth and depth.

Ostensibly a film within a film, the opening scene credits Godard’s film about the making of Fritz Lang’s film of “The Odyssey”. Lang, playing himself, is glorious as actor, director, Greek chorus and Tiresias all rolled into one man of heart and vision.

Piccoli and Bardot, the young married couple Paul and Camille, are to some extent merely stand-ins for the characters they play. They are not required to render real performances any more than the actors in Lang’s “Odyssey” are required to do more than place their bodies within the frame of the camera’s gaze. These actors represent pawns in a game played by the gods. So, too, forces beyond their control and understanding buffet about the actors, directors and the young couple in the “real life” of Godard’s epic journey. To be discordant is in keeping with the modern fractured world.

Bardot is never more sublimely empty than in the scene showing her smoldering nude body stretched out across a bed glowing in voluptuous semi-darkness. It is the first of many different versions of contempt. In the mumbled tones of intimate after-love, Camille inventories her own formidable physical assets, asking Paul if he loves each body part she enumerates. With her laundry list of skin and bones, she is plainly telling him that this transient envelope of existence is all of her that there is to be known.

She suspects him, even now, of not being entirely fulfilled in the thrall of the perfect specimen of the machine of her body. Her contempt is also for becoming a real woman beyond the perversely conventional dichotomy of wife/femme fatale. All she can do is try on a black wig; in her world, a different look is the closest she can get to a different dimension.

Paul asserts that he loves each part of her equally, from which she concludes in dead earnest that he therefore loves her completely. He agrees, adding, “tragically.” Matching her black wig, he has adopted the look of a black hat in the hopes of inheriting some of Dean Martin’s charisma and success. It is his effort to acquire a desired aspect rather than discover his own character.

Paul pretends that he is a serious writer rather than a hack journeyman for hire. Though he knows how to secure a reasonably hefty paycheck and to play hard to get, what he has to offer is a list of decaying literary attributes as lifeless as Camille’s body parts. If he at an earlier time aspired to even a modicum of artistic achievement, he turned out to be no more than an avenue for someone else’s prosaic imagination to travel on. The longevity of his market value will not exceed Camille’s. Neither has the substance without which personal destiny has no core.

Camille and Paul’s story mimics in pathetic dis-similarity the story of Ulysses and Penelope. Paul has been asked by a famous American producer, Jerry Prokosch- played with over-sized vulgarity and ceaseless narcissistic zeal by Jack Palance- to rewrite the script for Lang’s film to make it sexier and “new.” Prokosch invites the couple to his villa for a drink, taking the beautiful young wife in his little red sports car while vaguely suggesting that Paul come along in a cab. Camille is hesitant; Paul insists she go, that he will follow. She exudes the uncertainty and anger of being even temporarily unclaimed by the designated other. The spell of her and Paul’s magical interlude is broken; she cannot forgive.

Paul’s cab ride, like Ulysses' journey, doesn’t go as planned. The taxi gets into an accident. To find another cab he has to walk for 20 minutes from the Castello Sant’Angelo to the Piazza Venezia. He is half an hour late. With the heartless brevity redolent of contemporary attention deficit disorder, Ulysses’ decade of meaningful wandering and development has been reduced to thirty pointless minutes. These few minutes of unexpected waiting have stretched Camille beyond her resources. Paul makes matters worse by flirting with the producer’s attractive assistant/interpreter. Each knows that this day has revealed something neither of them wanted to discover.

Paul quotes Dante’s lines about Ulysses' last voyage: “We rejoiced, but soon our joy turned to grief…and the sea closed in on us.” Perhaps the most concise poetic description of the journey of life and a virtual blueprint description of Paul and Camille's fate, this oracle is followed by the spectacularly oppositional imagery of the harsh and dry opaque verticality of the rocky cliffs of the island of Capri partly encircling and overshadowing a tiny cove of brilliant, glistening deep turquoise water.

For Lang, Ulysses’ character cannot be changed without changing the entire nature and substance of the story- it would no longer be the Odyssey. That Ulysses could not restrain his desire to gain experience of the world despite his love for his family and known world was the instantiation of his desire to know himself; he and his world are inseparable. Lang’s interpretation and understanding of the Odyssey and of Ulysses is of no interest to the American producer. Prokosch wants to re-envision the context of the Odyssey with Ulysses restyled as a modern man, an everyday neurotic. Secretly unhappy with Penelope and suspecting her fidelity, in this version Ulysses goes off to war, not bothering to hurry home after the victory and only killing all his wife’s suitors in order to save face. Prokosch’s Ulysses is a clever, defensive ambler, irrelevant in an uncaring world, responding as best he can to gain advantage or evade the unwanted.

Paul resonates with this convenient view of Ulysses’ fate for it will explain why Camille no longer loves him. Paul’s boredom, thoughtless over-confidence, carelessness, and meaningless flirting have produced her disdain. That this idea makes no sense doesn’t matter. It fits the modern concept of mechanistic cause and effect, lacks entirely any sense of responsible volition and obviates any deeper understanding of or inquiries about the nature of love and desire. Camille responds by flirting with Prokosch partly to punish Paul, but more because she has no other persona to enact or call upon.

Camille recalls idyllic images of their earlier happiness: a simple, uncomplicated and unconscious love of unboundaried bliss and pleasant delirium. Paul envisions a time when Camille would no longer love him, but the corresponding image is of her perfect unchanged nude body, suppliant as always. She dreams of the past; he begins to imagine a different future.

The young couple argues. Paul asks Camille why she no longer loves him and her reply is that she would rather die than tell. However, barely a few minutes pass before she does tell: she hates him because he is incapable of moving her. Camille’s contempt is akin to hating god for not being more god-like. As if denouncing a false god for his impotence, she does not see that the error and responsibility are her own. She no longer loves Paul because he is just a man. Previously she placed him in the position of a god, or, at least, co-conspirator in their undifferentiated and repetitive unconscious instinctual vitality. Now she finds he cannot make her love him any more than a god can make someone believe or worship sincerely. She feels abandoned and is incapable of moving in any direction on her own. She needs the other to move her, even as she resists. Prokosch’s large gestures may be empty and false, but they are unambiguous and predictable. It is no surprise when she goes off with the American; their fates are sealed in their separate yet equal inabilities to find another dimension or view of themselves. Endless repetition requires no next scene and the handsome runaway couple meet a sudden and unglamorous end in a highway accident: the little red sports car crushed like crumpled paper in the gigantic rig of a tractor-trailer, the two bodies slumped like discarded dolls.

Lang’s deeply human and humane character reminds us that man can only be human. Dante echoes again; man is not made to live like a brute, but to follow virtue and knowledge: to aspire to them, to keep them ever in our sight.

In the final scene of Godard’s film Paul has found the letter from Camille and he, too, prepares to depart. On the rooftop terrace of the Capri villa, Lang is shooting the end of his film; he describes it to Paul as that moment when Ulysses first sees his homeland. The actor playing Ulysses, barely more than a prop himself, moves sideways across the edge of the terrace. The camera sweeps along with him and then finally past him, out to a pure uninterrupted view of the horizon of sky and sea. Nothing and everything is there. The film has come full circle back to its own beginning as Ulysses eventually comes back to Ithaca. It is no mere return, the place and man are no longer the same, each is new and more. To find his way home Ulysses must first see his home in his mind’s eye, exactly as the artist must first see the vision of his work.