Le Mépris (1963): the odd couple Godard and Bardot make a classic (Review)

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot started acting in 1952, at the age of 17. By the end of that decade she was the most famous woman in France, for her films, her music and the gleefully-reported-on turmoil of her private life. Among actresses of this era, only Marilyn Monroe was more famous. Like Monroe, Bardot was a sex symbol. Also like Monroe, she found this closed as many doors as it opened. Monroe tragically didn’t live to see Hollywood’s pivot towards the grittier, more challenging material she yearned to play in the 1970s, but Bardot’s rise to fame happily coincided with French cinema’s most ambitious and groundbreaking era. She found plenty of first-rank directors willing to help her break out of the sex-kitten mould, and her collaborations with Henri-Georges Clouzot and Louis Malle had even her harshest critics admitting there was a real actor under the glamorous facade.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris, released in a 60th anniversary 4K Blu-Ray restoration by Studiocanal, also won her acclaim. But it was acclaim on Godard’s terms, not Bardot’s. Godard tended to regard star names as something akin to found objects in an art gallery: the opening credits to 1985’s Détective bill certain performers as “actors” and others as “stars”, categories that implicitly do not overlap. Two years later, he would direct Eddie Constantine in his signature role, the ex-FBI sleuth Lemmy Caution, in Alphaville. Alphaville does not resemble any film Constantine had made before, but it pays scrupulous attention to his screen persona. In Le Mépris he would do something similar for Bardot. It opens with Godard’s own voiceover announcing that the film you’re about to see stars Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli, and it goes on to tick off everything that her fans expect to see in a Bardot vehicle. The context they appear in may be a surprise.

Some items on the checklist caused Godard more headaches than others. Bardot’s international fame meant that, for the first time, he had an American producer in the form of Joseph E. Levine. Levine knew that to Americans European cinema meant sex, and European cinema starring Brigitte Bardot doubly so. He stipulated that there be three nude scenes at the beginning, middle and end of the film. Godard pointed out that the latter two, at least, would be difficult in a story about a man and a woman growing more distant. He somehow managed to incorporate them, and the first one has become an icon of a certain kind of French cinema. In an echo of the motel-room discussions from his debut, Breathless, Godard has Bardot’s Camille ask Piccoli’s Paul an endless string of questions about whether he likes various parts of her body. It was, by some distance, the most quoted and acclaimed part of the movie on its original release, despite Godard’s admission that it’s the only scene in the film that doesn’t advance the plot.

Indeed, anyone looking for an accessible entry point into Godard’s filmography might be cheered by how plot-driven Le Mépris is. It’s based closely on Alberto Moravia’s novel A Ghost at Noon, and even the liberties Godard takes with his source material are rooted in the text. (Moravia writes of a German director who’s well-regarded but no Fritz Lang, so Godard casts Fritz Lang in that very role) It is unusual in Godard’s canon in being about what it says it’s about, specifically a screenwriter watching helplessly as his unscrupulous producer seduces his wife. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t depth and subtext to it. Lang is cast as an icon of cinematic integrity; the dialogue reminds us that this is a man who was offered the keys to the whole German film industry by Joseph Goebbels, and he chose to flee the country instead. Now Paul is being hired to rewrite Lang’s vision by the producer Prokosch (Jack Palance), and part of the reason why Camille – who can strike some viewers as under-motivated – leaves him in favour of the reptilian Prokosch is because she can’t respect a man who allows himself to be used like that. Not for nothing does the film’s title translate to Contempt.

The most provocative subtext in Le Mépris, then, is that the Hollywood studio system is capable of finishing the job the Nazis failed at and taming Fritz Lang. The first glimpse we get of the film-within-a-film, a Lang-directed adaptation of The Odyssey, is one of the most astonishing things in the film, but you can see why it enrages Prokosch. Eschewing the psychology and character arcs the producer wants to bring to Homer’s text, it simply consists of Greek statues and models posing in front of a brilliant blue sky. It’s strangely haunting, and like the whole film it benefits from Raoul Coutard’s glorious cinematography. Everyone has their own film aesthetic that strikes them as impossible to improve on, and here’s mine: dominated by powder-paint blues and reds, shot with the widest possible angle lens on the longest possible dolly, it’s a mystery to me why anyone makes films that don’t look like this.

As the film-within-the-film shows, Godard might be undertaking a more commercial assignment here but he’s still finding plenty of corners to experiment in. His openness to new forms extends to two making-of shorts, included here in the extras. Both made by the acclaimed documentarian Jacques Rozier, Le Parti des choses: Bardot et Godard is merely a better-than-average promo film about the odd couple, but Paparazzi is genuinely fascinating. It documents the film shoot from the perspective of the swarms of photographers who crowded around Godard’s shoot hoping to catch a glimpse of his lead actress, a wonderfully inventive idea that’s also a fascinating time capsule of the media’s evolving relationship with celebrity. There’s also an introduction by one of the giants of English-language Godard scholarship, Colin McCabe, and the restoration means the film itself glows with sun, as it should.

Graham’s Archive: Le Mepris (1963)