Welcome to Godard 101, an unofficial and unaffiliated online undergraduate seminar where Ben and I take on the great man and his works, doing our best to understand how Jean-Luc got from there to here.  First up, Ben and I took a look at Breathless, the film that, along with Francois Truffault's 400 Blows, blew the roof off the joint back in 1960, kicking off the Nouvelle Vague and recreating cinema. Pretty heady shit. Then, we reviewed A Woman is a Woman, which you can find here. This was followed with an examination of To Live Her Life.

And now for something completely different...a film where Godard seems to hold everyone, including himself, in...

Contempt (France, 1963, Godard)

I am just blown away... at how much I dislike Contempt.  The title of the film comes pretty close to my feeling about it.  What a disappointment!  The only thing I can admire is Godard's continuation of his chameleon act.  It's hard to believe that this is the same guy who made the three others by him I've seen, and in such short succession too.

 

But this time out, it appears all too obvious that Godard has retreated from all of the edgy, interesting investigations inspiring his previous work in order to deliver a much more accessible and dare I say blatently commercial offering.  It's kinda cool to see Fritz Lang playing himself and filling in as Godard's intellectual mouthpiece at that.  And there's nothing wrong with the contributions of Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot other than the fact that neither of them are able to provide performances that go beyond their stock tough guy and sexy chick screen personas.

 

But it hardly matters because the screenplay is a boring, pretentious drag that drags.  It's Bergman lite and therefore trite.  Think a mere, single scene from Scenes From a Marriage, extrapolated into an entire movie, except without any of the seriously meaty Scandinavian angst.  Instead, the atmospherics are positively Mediterranean as the thing is literally set in the south of Italy on the water with the sun making the whole world bright and shiny.  As if this is some sort of reverse pathetic fallacy, but actually it's just travalogue window dressing for the Fantasy Island gone bad espisode.  There's a movie-in-the-movie about "The Odyssey" allowing for parellels to be drawn between the deteriorating relationship of the couple in the movie and the perhaps problematic relationship between Odysseus and Penelope.  Make it stop.  Heavy-handed and dull-witted.  It's difficult to fathom how such conceptually pedestrian fare was found by Godard to be worthy of consideration.

 

Maybe all of this could be overlooked if the camera performed some impressive magic, but no.  In one long passage, there is an extended series of interiors that give the impression of happening in real time; that move in and out of the rooms of an apartment in interconnected tracking shots that are so gracefully put together, this passage of the film sort of glides by on gossamer threads.  But beyond this, I found the cinematography either standard enough or needlessly distant, both spatially and thematically.  The opening scene of the film features Bardot backside up and naked on a bed.  Lovely to see but Godard himself seems to be telling us that it is gratuitous when he slaps different primary colour gels on top of the scene as it titilates the viewer.

 

P.T. Barnum or H.L. Menken or F.V.Zappa said nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.  I'm guessing that Contempt was a big hit when it came out.  I'm also guessing the film has a good reputation amongst critics all these years later.  This is the sort of film that has the veneer of being deep art that anyone wearing a knock-off beret from Sears can see on a third date and can appreciate in a cafe afterwards in order to get laid.

 

Meanwhile, My Life to Live has a movie-within-the movie interlude that is a faithful replication of Dyer's Joan that just resonates with serious intensity on about 10 levels.  Who is the Godard guy and how could he make something as humdrum yet full-of-itself as Contempt?

And Dan:

Contempt was one of the first Godard films I saw, and I was thoroughly bored by it. It is one of the reasons that I told you a few years back that I preferred Truffault to Godard. It was an ill-informed opinion, as further exposure to the two has shown me that Godard is clearly the more significant filmmaker, and I don't have much to add to your review but a concurrence that Contempt is a real mess, and I'll stand behind you on that one til the sky turns green.

Then Ben:

Thank you for the confirmation.  And your agreement.  In addition to you, I feel validated by a few facts to be found on Wiki.  Turns out the project was initiated not by Godard but by Carlo Ponti, based on some Italian novel from the mid 50s that I suppose was a best seller there.  And the director and the producer had differences of opinion about who should star and whatnot.

 

It would be nice to think that the antagonism between the director and the writer against the producer of the film within, "The Odyssey," in the film Contempt is Godard's way of tweaking Ponti in particular and commercial contraints in general.  Nice to think.  But the actual result is off-putting self-obsession with no significant critique.

 

Same goes for the multi-lingual aspect of the film.  I had entertained the notion that it was a sort of Tower of Babel motif, reflecting the breakdown of communications between the couple - their exchanges are terribly stilted, circular and infantile - but this was a desperate reach.  Turns out the muti-lingualism was due to the international nature of the production.  Besides, outside of the French market, Contempt was over-dubbed into whatever one language the market required.

 

But get this from Wiki: "One of the most notable blurbs about the film: "Sight & Sound critic Colin MacCabe called Contempt "the greatest work of art produced in postwar Europe."  Now THIS is one of those posers I mentioned before who wears a knock-off Beret from Sears.

And Dan:

In the end, Contempt is notable mostly in that it represents the direction that Godard chose not to take with his career. He looked big budget movie making square in the eye and said, "On second thought, no thanks."

Then Ben:

I think you are right on the money about Contempt.  But some of Godard's other color pictures needed bigger financing than his b/w films.  The whole issue of b/w vs. colour in Godard is an academic research project unto itself, but Coutard says in an interview (Criterion special feature to Band of Outsiders, if memory serves) that Godard's movement between them was largely determined by budgetary factors.  When you see, for example, Crazy Pete, you will notice that it cost something to make.

Ici le trailer: