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Contempt
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
| Taken from
Alberto Moravia`s novel Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon), Jean-Luc Godard`s
Le mépris—Contempt—is about marital disintegration. The marriage
of Camille and Paul is given any number of chances to recover. In
reality, though, it has no chance. We watch helpless. It`s
a devastating experience.
There are, in fact, three main characters. Paul is a French playwright; he and Camille are living in Rome where he is revising the script of a movie of Homer`s Odyssey being shot in Capri. Jeremiah is an American Mephistopheles; he is the Homer film`s producer who demands that the rewrite be made along commercially-minded lines. When in fact Paul succumbs to Jeremiah`s temptation of $10,000, this compromise of his integrity fills Camille with sudden contempt for him. The tear in Paul`s professional life, then, reflects the rip already unseaming his marriage. Why on earth would Paul do such a thing? If you were making a film of The Odyssey, Jeremiah is the last person you`d want in control. A misogynist, he believes—hang the text!—that Penelope was unfaithful to Odysseus—since Penelope epitomizes fidelity, a sure sign Jeremiah believes that all women are incapable of fidelity. No man should fall under Jeremiah`s sway, much less a married one. When Paul taps the breast of a metal female statue, and then its vagina, and declares, “It doesn`t sound the same,” we are unsure whether he is comparing one part of the statue to the other or the statue parts to human parts, that is to say, Camille`s anatomy; but we are certain that Jeremiah has “got” him. But how could this have happened? Can the money itself explain it? Paul is such an intelligent soul, so unlikely to be seduced by someone who so plainly manifests evil as Jeremiah, that we wonder: Anxious to test and hopefully determine his wife`s love for him, is Paul in fact courting her contempt? This possibility might indeed appeal to Godard, because it reverses the stereotypes of gender psychology; here the woman is straight, the man convoluted. Whether there is more to his fateful decision, Paul of course does want the money. Ironically, his rationale for taking Jeremiah up on his offer is—what else?—his marriage. With the ten grand, he and Camille will be able to stay in their fancy Rome digs. It turns out, however, that the place isn`t big enough for three: Paul, Camille, Camille`s contempt for him. Paul is full of rationalizations,
and mental maneuvers exceeding even his own grasp. Without realizing
it, he is nudging Camille in the direction of Jeremiah`s—Jeremy’s—bed all
to advance his career, which in turn, of course, would accrue to the financial
benefit of their marriage. Paul is a decent sort who
An early (and brilliant) passage provides a key for understanding Camille and Paul`s trouble as a couple. Lying in bed, naked, face down, Camille asks Paul, who lies alongside her, propped up, a series of questions, constantly referring her spouse to her reflected image in a mirror that (off-screen) faces him. Anatomizing herself, she elicits an inventory of Paul`s “likes” about the physical her from head to toe. For example, one of her long series of questions is, “Are my breasts your favorite part of me? Enamored of each “part,” however, Paul is not about to choose. Finally, after having run through her inventory without Paul`s acknowledging a preference, she asks, “Then you love me totally?” To this Paul has no difficulty responding: “Yes, I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.” These magnificent words reveal the depth of his affection for his wife. But something disturbs them. The series of three adverbs oddly echoes the fragmenting quality of Camille`s own questioning; and therefore, although the sentiment they express goes in a contrary direction, the direction of Paul`s deepest heart, the words inadvertently confirm the torn self-image that prompted Camille`s questions in the first place. In turn, this reflects on the couple`s fissured union, one which, at the very least, despite tremendous mutual love, isn`t up to the task of achieving a wholeness the two participants can share. Loveless marriages are difficult enough to watch in their death throes; but this? Godard`s irony pierces. To me, this is extraordinary filmmaking: hinting a couple`s rift, a scene of apparent marital comfort and intimacy. Moreover, Godard riddles the passage with question marks of his own. What he brings to our eye just doesn`t “hang right.” For one thing, while Camille is naked, Paul is in his underwear: a mismatch—out of sync. Various flashing monochromes create at intervals still more visual discontinuity, putting us at unease and suggesting, too, discords lying in wait. Also, for all the air of intimacy between wife and husband, a sense of distance arises from the fact that Paul doesn`t once refer to the mirror Camille directs his attention to. This is Godard at his most marvelously devious; for the scene is thus able to imply that, by not following Camille`s visual cue, Paul is also ignoring Camille`s “reality” in the mirror in favor of his own image of her, right before his eyes, in bed--a reversal of values (normally, mirrors in films posit the subjective or the fantastic image) suggestive of the loose ends at which this marriage finds itself. Too, running throughout the bed scene is a disconcerting echo of “Little Red Riding Hood,” dear to the French in the seventeenth-century version by Charles Perrault. There, a little child ends up being eaten by a wolf. Nameless, the girl is known only by the garment that her family—specifically, her grandmother—has made for her. Her namelessness suggests from the outset her vulnerability; without her own identity, the child lacks an independent sense of self from which to draw strength. She is somebody`s daughter, somebody`s granddaughter—but not, as we might say, her own person. Masquerading as the child`s ailing grandmother, the Wolf, symbolically, is what in fact he has eaten and what he now pretends to be, the child`s grandmother; for it is the girl`s own family that has devoured her by denying her an identity apart from theirs. Right before she is eaten by Grandmother-Wolf, the child anatomizes it, focusing on one body part of the beast after another. This provides an index of the child`s terror; for the whole is too overwhelming to take in at once. And more: the anatomizing is a dehumanizing activity that projects onto Grandmother-Wolf the child`s own sense of inadequacy and unworthiness that has accumulated into her sense of being nothing. The culmination of this is her becoming literally nothing by her being eaten up. In other words, at least in the Perrault version, the child`s finish completes a process she has been socialized into, the progressive legacy from one generation to the next that devalues females by attaching their identities to others. It is a vicious cycle, for it is by appropriating the identities of younger females that the older females themselves compensate for their own lack of identity. In any case, Perrault`s shocking ending—there is no reconstitution of the child as in some later versions of the story—encapsulates how countless children really feel—and countless adults whom, for whatever reason(s) (gender, race, religion), society works to maintain as subjugated “children.” In Godard`s film, Camille`s seemingly carefree self-anatomization insinuates the tragic outcome of Perrault`s masterpiece, but with the meanings deftly shifted or inverted to reflect a different set of social imperatives. Perrault`s character is too fragmented to withstand the oppressive “whole” of the wholly devouring Wolf. On the other hand, we can trace Camille`s fragmented feeling to a newer emphasis on individuality and independence—for females and males both. For Camille to find her marriage fulfilling, she must be able to find in it some capacity to make her feel whole as antidote to the burdens of responsibility that the new shibboleths—individuality, independence—have placed on her, fragmenting her. For all his love for her, Paul here is no help. By limiting himself to his wife`s self-anatomizing terms, by not identifying the both of them, as one, in terms of their shared relationship, by failing to invent or help Camille invent a new concept of their union allowing their equal and simultaneous participation, Paul inadvertently lets stand, and even extends, Camille`s sense of fragmentation. Camille feels acutely that their union hasn`t achieved the hoped-for “oneness” making each partner “complete.” In earlier times, this “oneness,” enforced, was predicated on the man`s subjugation of his wife. In the absence, now, of this fraudulent unity, however, nothing new has yet been created for couples to achieve a legitimate sense of “oneness”; and, on this score more nostalgic for the past, males may be slower than their spouses in apprehending the problem. This, also, keeps the couple “apart.” It isn`t Camille and Paul`s marriage that we witness in the film; it`s Camille`s and Paul`s. To analogize: rather than being a solution, their marriage is a loose, for a while loving, suspension. It is Paul`s failure even to try to help Camille achieve this “solution,” then, that lies behind her outburst of contempt for him. His compromising his craft by accepting money to do hack work reflects the extent to which he has compromised, is compromising, their marriage. It is certainly not the case, however, that Paul is solely responsible for the failure of the marriage. They both are. In the transitional time for the institution and practice of marriage that Godard is addressing, what one partner is unable to do, so is the other; and it hardly matters which one is better able to identify the problem. Consider this: Camille`s questions in the bed scene mislead Paul into thinking that their union already is perfect; perplexed, he will later say to her, “Something happened that changed your whole idea of me.” In yet another of Godard`s reversals of stereotypes, here it is the wife, not the husband, who has failed to express feelings, who has failed to communicate. But how does one express what oneself is unaware of? Camille doesn`t mean to mislead Paul; she is simply unable to grasp what their problems are, or—until she is convinced of her contempt for him—that they even have a serious problem. Nor can Camille save this marriage. This is why her explosive contempt for her husband also reflects self-contempt. Clearly Godard doesn`t mean for us to view this marriage as either pathological or idiosyncratic. Rather, its failure illustrates a problem of its time. In the film, Fritz Lang, no less, plays himself supposedly directing The Odyssey. Better than Lang`s minimal acting, though, is Godard`s homage to this filmmaker, not only in the fierce fatalism that pervades Contempt, but also in some of its grand imagery. For example, the outdoor symmetrical stone stairway—here, also, a symbol of nonnegotiable fate—recalls the one in Destiny (1921), Lang`s masterpiece, and one of the most sublime and magical works of cinema. In fact, all Contempt`s imagery is remarkable. Absolutely haunting, for example, are the closeups of statuary heads of ancient gods. Raoul Coutard nicely lensed the film in color, and Georges Delerue contributed a lovely score. Of the three lead actors, two serve the film well. As skinny as a piccolo, Michel Piccolo creates a suitably anguished and befuddled Paul. Jack Palance plays Jeremiah. Crassness and colossal egotism are traits he has little difficulty projecting; but, a blunt actor in a role requiring finesse, he is a constant drag on the film. And Brigitte Bardot, the ‘50s sex kitten who set men`s hearts racing? As Camille she is warm, fresh, volatile, very moving—and incredibly beautiful. Hers, the performance of the film, happily reminds that, like (either) Renoir a terrific lover of women, Godard is one of the world`s great directors of women. |
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