Le Mépris is Jean-Luc Godard’s lushly photographed 1963 epic that charts the breakdown of a marriage while taking numerous satirical stabs at the heart of Hollywood commercialisation.

In Godard’s first feature film, A bout de souffle (Breathless), Jean Seberg’s Patricia quotes a line of Faulkner to Jean-Paul Belmondo’s Michel, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.” Michel responds with typical loucheness – he would take nothing, because for him it must be all or nothing.

In Le Mépris (Contempt), Godard’s sumptuously realised take on a life of images, we move past these ideas of all or nothingness, of grief or joy, to be shown a fractal world where the spaces between words and actions are as vital as the things themselves.

The film is two stories in parallel. Firstly, of the conflict between artistic expression and capitalist endeavour in the increasingly frantic efforts of Jack Palance’s Jeremy Prokosch and his attempts to turn Fritz Lang’s (playing himself) cinematic version of Homer’s Odyssey into something he considers more commercially viable. Secondly, of the conflict between Michel Piccoli’s Paul Javal, the writer hired to rework the script, and his wife Camille played by Brigitte Bardot. So we have art talking to commerce, men talking to women.

The third aspect is perhaps Godard himself talking to his audience. Using Lang as a mouthpiece, he espouses upon many concepts of cinema, “each picture should have a definite point of view,” we are told, before being launched into a saga of passive-aggression and recriminatory back-and-forth which leaves one picking over motivation and cause like a CSI technician on the Capri beach beat.

The film is beautiful. When outdoors, the scenes are flooded with that particularly Italian kind of light, which looks as though you would leave a trail in it if you waved your hand through the air, and the camera frequently lingers on the sea’s boundless horizon as if filled with the same formless longing that informs so much of the characters’ actions.

Indoors, you won’t see a finer playing of space and motion than in the justly famous central scene between Paul and Camille. As they break apart and make up over and again, the conversation ebbing and flowing, they move from room to room and closer to and further away from each other with a balletic tenderness.

Camille’s sublimated anger at having been abandoned to the lecherous advances of Prokosch by Paul swirls through the room like steam, and she wraps herself in the red cape of her rage – one of the many simple yet brilliant uses of colour throughout the film.

The characters, too, are expertly drawn. Plenty has been said already about the ways in which this film mirrors what was really happening at the time: Godard’s fracturing relationship with his wife Anna Karina, the actual struggles with studio bosses who wanted more sex and less art.

But you don’t need to know any of this to enjoy Palance as the virulent and vitriolic Prokosch, leering at mermaids and screeching through Italy in his sports car on his way to seduce Camille for no other reason than because he can and he wants to.

It’s never quite clear why Paul lets Camille go, then throws responsibility for their collective fate onto her shoulders. “So, of course, you despise me” he spits at her back as they stalk away from Prokosch’s isolated villa, and it’s that ‘of course’ which burns through the story.

In the greatest of classical traditions, this is a film about the inevitability of fate, and it’s not a good fate either: whatever love there was is not regained, and as far as Godard’s own mission for a more thoughtful, more considered cinema goes – well, look at what fills theatres today and ask yourself whether it was more likely to have been made by a Fritz Lang or a Jeremy Prokosch.

Among his other declarations Lang proclaims the Odyssey to be, in the true Greek tradition, “a fight of the individual against the circumstance.” Le Mépris follows that to its bitter end, the titular emotion turning from the weapons the characters range against one another to being the very wounds they suffer. Fortunately for us the entire process is shot with such unremitting resplendence that it’s completely worth the pain.

Check out our in-depth look a Masculin Feminin, Jean-Luc Godard’s critique of restless youth.











Summary Title: Le Mépris: Jean-Luc Godard's satirical stab at Hollywood Description: Le Mépris is Godard’s lushly photographed 1963 epic that charts the breakdown of a marriage while taking satirical stabs at Hollywood commercialisation. Author: Douglas Clarke-Williams Brought to you by: Methods Unsound Logo: