Le Mépris (1963)

“Is that smile mock­ing, or ten­der?” asks bemused screen­writer Paul Javal (Michel Pic­coli) of his naked, newish wife Camille (Brigitte Bar­dot), as the two pace their half-dec­o­rat­ed, new­ly acquired flat in Rome. They are con­duct­ing a pre­ma­ture autop­sy of their mar­riage in Jean-Luc Godard’s mul­ti-lin­gual French-Ital­ian co-pro­duc­tion Le Mépris.

Godard’s sixth movie – as good a can­di­date as any to be named the director’s mas­ter­piece – itself pos­es a plen­i­tude of such rhetor­i­cal ques­tions, cru­el­ly con­nect­ing deri­sive darts and com­pas­sion­ate insights. The film is the director’s rework­ing of nov­el­ist Alber­to Moravia’s ​“nice, vul­gar” tale of Paul and Camille’s tragi­com­ic mis­for­tunes dur­ing a Mediter­ranean loca­tion film shoot of Homer’s ​‘The Odyssey’. The film-with­in-a-film has been clas­si­cal­ly re-imag­ined by direc­tor Fritz Lang (play­ing, very mov­ing­ly, him­self ) and com­mer­cial­ly bas­tardised by philis­tine pro­duc­er Jere­mi­ah Prokosch (Hol­ly­wood hardman/​villain Jack Palance, hyper­bol­i­cal­ly, scar­i­ly, socio­path­i­cal­ly entertaining).

An immense amount of off-screen activ­i­ty is at work too: Bar­dot, in 1963 and at the height of her celebri­ty, had not been devel­op­ing as an actress under her hus­band, the pro­duc­er-direc­tor Roger Vadim. Despite report­ed dif­fi­cul­ties (along­side Godard weav­ing vari­a­tions of his own internecine rela­tion­ship with wife Anna Kari­na into Bardot’s role and on-screen mar­riage), she deliv­ers per­haps her finest per­for­mance, embody­ing her instinc­tive, life-coerced char­ac­ter with a potent cock­tail of sen­su­al allure, fierce mys­tery and gen­uine pathos.

Like­wise, Godard, smart­ing from the lam­bast­ing of his pre­vi­ous movie, Les Cara­biniers, was deter­mined, in his own inter­pre­ta­tion of clas­si­cal film gram­mar, to show he knew exact­ly where to place a movie cam­era. To this end, he encour­aged genius cam­era­man Raoul Coutard to orches­trate with his ​’Scope cam­era (“suit­able only for film­ing snakes and coffins”) an arrest­ing series of sin­u­ous, almost spiro­graph­ic dances. These grace­ful glides and pans were a response to the impe­ri­ous, opaque-eyed gods and mean­ders for the mere, fool­ish mortals.

Known as the Godard favourite amongst the non-Godar­d­ians, Le Mépris cer­tain­ly is one of the director’s more eas­i­ly con­sum­able works. A fine con­tri­bu­tion to the genre of movies on mov­ing-mak­ing – on the death of cin­e­ma, and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of its renew­al – it also offers acces­si­ble and mean­ing­ful mus­ings on, amongst oth­ers, such mat­ters as des­tiny and freewill, empa­thy and self-inter­est, sen­su­ous­ness and aes­theti­cism, prin­ci­ple and prag­ma­tism, the nat­ur­al and the indus­tri­al, the poet­ic and the pro­sa­ic and using com­e­dy and tragedy to tell the sto­ries of human lives.

In short, it is a full and immense­ly sat­is­fy­ing work, its ten­sions and teas­ing con­tra­dic­tions, moral, cin­e­mat­ic and intel­lec­tu­al, mak­ing it as exhil­a­rat­ing, alive and mod­ern a film as any. Georges Delerue’s sub­lime score is cru­cial in unit­ing all the film’s irrec­on­cil­ables. The repeat­ed motifs and melodies them­selves com­bine, as does the movie, the clas­si­cal and the mod­ern, deep­e­nen­ing the mean­ings and the mixed emo­tions of defi­ance and nos­tal­gia that make Le Mépris so very affect­ing and – a word Godard would be proud of – so very beautiful.