Le Mepris: Review

Contempt, a film most consider to be Jean-Luc Godard's most accessible work, is still a difficult yet ultimately rewarding experience for those willing to play by its rules. However, those who wish to sit idle while watching movies will find Godard's finished piece boring and incomplete. Long considered to be the most difficult and complex filmmaker of the primary French New Wave participants, Godard's filmography ranges from sheer frustration to sublime joy and Contempt or Le Mepris is somewhere in between. Featuring only five speaking parts, the film is slow yet never boring, its technical accomplishments luring the viewer in while simultaneously pushing them away through its self conscious attempts to label itself as a piece of cinema. It's highly stylized camera movements, color tinting and self referential nature all lend themselves to having the film be not only narratively about the making of a film, but also about the larger idea of cinema as a whole. For anyone interested in the creative process, the film is mesmerizing, never quite reaching the level of Fellini's masterful 8 1/2 but adding its own important and vital thoughts into the genre.

The joy that comes from Godard's film is distinct and is often difficult to find. They require the utmost participation from their audiences, and without it, they are long, slow, turgid affairs and Contempt is no different. Throughout, Godard tries his hardest to push his audience away from the film's narrative, refusing the easy entry that most American audiences have grown accustomed to from their viewing of the Hollywood style of filmmaking. For Hollywood, cinematic conventions and techniques are designed to be invisible, a means for telling the story. This was especially true in the era prior to the early 1960's (Contempt was released in 1963). Hollywood filmmakers feared losing their audiences attention or emotional reactions with notable cuts, camera movements, etc. When an audience consciously notices a cut, it takes them away from the story and forces them to consider what that cut was. Godard lives and dies with each cut, demanding his audience notice each interruption of narrative. Contempt wants its audience to not only think about the narrative concerns of the struggles of filmmaking but of actual cinematic concepts and theories as well.

In fact, in many ways Contempt feels like the physical manifestation of much of the theorizing and thinking that came out of the pages of "Cahiers Du Cinema", which unsurprisingly featured writers such as Godard. However, where many of his French New Wave contemporaries subtlety melded new techniques with older Hollywood genres and conventions, Godard is much more deliberate and obvious. As a result, his films are radically different experiences than Truffaut's or Melville's, theoretically dense dramas rather than the lovely, entertaining dramedies of Truffaut or Melville's hard boiled thrillers. The script here, written by Godard, is wandering and loose, filled with more in depth philosophizing and metaphors than narrative exposition. This isn't one's typical cinematic pop philosophy made popular by the likes of Tarantino and Linklater either, but a more academic discussion that requires genuine thought. As I mentioned earlier, there are only five speaking roles and inside of those, there is truly only two that have any substantial weight: Paul (played by Michael Piccoli) and Camille (Brigitte Bardot). Most of the film is composed of their conversations, with the middle 30 minutes dominated by an argument that Godard presents with a raw, uncut nature. Granted this isn't Godard's primary (or secondary) concern, but both Piccoli and Bardot contribute wonderful performances here, carrying the weight of the film's emotional impact with relative ease.

It should be noted that, despite being four paragraphs into this review, the topic of narrative has been raised but what exactly composes the narrative has not. For many American audiences, this indifference will undoubtedly frustrate and anger. After all, why watch a film that barely tells a story that can be entirely summed up in a single sentence: A playwright, whose marriage is dissolving before his eyes, is hired by a big wig Hollywood producer to rewrite an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey? It requires a drastic and conscious leap, something not easy for a casual filmgoer, but then again, this isn't a film designed for that crowd. It is meant for the cinematic thinkers, the people who like their films to have more than a shred of intelligence. It’s vintage, classic art house fare, and will create conversation about how it’s beyond genius or how it is unbearably pretentious. In reality, it is somewhere between the two and is worth a look for anyone with a sense of cinematic risk and adventure

****/*****