Le mépris (Contempt)

The opening line of the contempt quotes Andre Bazin, "The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires." That made me expect a movie about desire and cinema and I could not be more wrong. The 1963 international coproduction is in beautiful Technicolor and cinemaScope. The story focuses on the relationship of playwright Paul Javel (Piccoli) and his wife Camille (Bardot). Paul is hired by ab American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Palance) to rewrite the script of a project, based on Homer's Odyssey, being directed by Fritz Lang (Lang himself).

On the surface, Contempt is a movie about movie making, the relationship between the producer and director. It ask what is the price of selling out; If the director is the prostitute who sells out the box office, the producer is, then, the pimp. In all aspects the movie doubles back on itself. Paul is selling himself out tho Prokosch and as his wife watches him, she falls out of love with him overnight and feels nothing but contempt towards him. But I was sure that all of
this was on the surface only. I tried to dig and figure out what Godard is saying. So like any self-respecting scholar, I reached over and Googled. After a rather long search, I could not agree more with Jonathan Rosenbaum saying:

Contempt is not simply a look at antiquity from the vantage point of modernity. Contempt is something more nearly akin to the reverse: a look at ourselves as we might appear to the Greek gods. Layering one antithetical style over another--classical over modern--Godard necessarily produces a work shot through with contradictions.

Godard, playing Lang's assistant director in the film, has the last word, heard over the final tracking movement across the sea, a final command to the film crew, "Silence," as the camera starts rolling--a command that's then translated into Italian. Godard's view of serenity and continuity is necessarily splintered, because the modern world is a Tower of Babel where languages and discourses compete for mastery over a purity that eludes our grasp. Not even silence is unmediated. There's a French silence, an Italian silence, a German silence, and an American silence; maybe even a Greek silence, which the film prefers to remain silent about.

All in all this is a dazzling movie and not be missed by any Godard
fan; something we should all be by now.