atlasmb
After reading the trivia notes for this film, I get the impression that the director and others involved with the film did not think too highly of it themselves. Regardless, I found it a great disappointment.I don't mind that a director is self-indulgent if his film has quality content. Because of the disjointed exposition of this film, I think we can label it "experimental". The camera movement (or lack of it) is a conscious choice which sometimes creates boring action (or inaction). The exaggerated use of colors seems to have little point beyond color effect. The opening scene--with a nude Bardot--supposedly was added at the insistence of a producer. I don't mind subtitles or voice-overs, but this film--which utilizes English, French, and even some German--is awkward in the extreme, using both subtitles and translations provided by characters. The sound has some bad spots where it is difficult to hear the voices over the ambient outdoor sounds. This distracts from the experience, as does the intrusive musical score which sometimes seems arbitrarily placed.The actors are fine within their roles, but the script does them no favors. The primary focus is the relationship between Camille (Bardot) and Paul (Michel Piccoli), a married couple. The dialogue obscures their intentions. And in my opinion, the relationship is rather boring, exploring little that is new or interesting.Attempts to elevate the film with intrusive Greek mythological iconography only serve to make the film feel pretentious.The bottom line is that the themes of this film have been explored with more skill many times before and after.
tieman64
Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" opens with a low-angle shot from a stationary camera. From this vantage point we watch as another camera tilts downward and gazes back at us. "Cinema substitutes for the real world one that accords more closely with our desires," Godard states. The relationship of the moving camera to the stationary camera is significant; it occupies a position of power and authority. We kneel before it."Contempt's" second sequence finds Camille (Brigitte Bardot) and Paul (Michel Piccoli) in bed. They're lovers. He's a playwright. She informs him that she will "visit her mother tomorrow," a detail which will later become significant. Throughout the scene, Camille is nude, but her anatomical listing of parts, which she asks Paul to "look at in the mirror", neutralises all eroticism. Godard uses red, blue and white filters throughout the scene – the colours of the French national flag – and has Cameille ask Paul if he would like her to keel before him. He says no. He loves her totally, not her reflection, not just as individual fetishized parts, but totally. She frowns, wanting Paul to love something that cannot be located in any part of the body, something which resists and exists beyond his image of her.Next scene: the Italian film industry is in ruins and finds itself prey to wealthy Hollywood producers, one of whom is Prokosch (Jack Palance), a man busy producing movies and turning Italian studios into shopping malls. Prokosch hires Fritz Lang (playing himself) to direct a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey and wants Paul to write a "commercial" screenplay. Paul agrees.Throughout the film, Godard presents language and economics as forces which prevent the articulation and actualisation of human desire. Everyone seems to be speaking a different language, and everyone struggles with translation and interpretation. Epitoimizing these differences are Lang, Prokosch and Paul. One speaks German, one French, one English. Each interprets Homer's Odyssey differently and each wishes to turn their subjective interpretations of artifacts/objects into private fantasy. Prokosch, a misogynist who believes Penelope (who epitomises fidelity) was unfaithful to Odysseus, wins. Alligned with Gods, and possibly named after the Prokosch family of linguists, he's able to force his will, his language, upon others. Lang, meanwhile, represents the old guard: an artist with integrity and values on the cusp of being replaced. Paul's the modern artist, a whore bent by market demands; his fate is still being written.If Paul is a future prostitute, Camille already is. We find her standing between film posters ("Vivre sa Vie", "Psycho", "Hatari", "Betrayer") which feature hunters, psychos and sex workers, the latter her symbolic role. Prokosch wants her, may have already had her when she "visited her mother", but Paul seems oblivious. He repeatedly "offers her" to Prokosch, whilst also selling his soul for money. Paul is aligned to Vincente Minnelli's "Some Came Running", a melodrama about a writer who struggles to hold on to his integrity. Lang's character is in a similar trap. He quotes a Bertolt Brecht line ("Every morning to earn my bread...") which likens scriptwriting to prostitution, but symbolically attributes the line to BB, the nickname of Brigitte Bardot. Prokosch, meanwhile, quotes Joseph Goebbels ("When I hear the word culture..."), Godard likening producers to Nazis.Like mice lost in a maze, Paul and Camille navigate their apartment. He thinks she's been abused by Prokosch, she thinks he slept with Prokosch's assistant. Both are unsure of the other's fidelity. More importantly, neither has a sense of what the other really wants, and both are unable to bring desire into tangible existence through language. This is the crux of the film: one can never fully articulate desire with language as there is always what Lacan called "surplus desire", that which exists beyond both articulation and satiation. And as "Contempt" shows, it is the attempt to fill the emptiness of one's desire with an actual object that destroys romance, though this is precisely what cinema typically offers its spectators. What Godard proposes in a number of his films is to resist resolving desire, embrace the troubled position of the desiring subject – and in so doing sustain some semblance of freedom - and recognise the inability of the filmic image to deliver this object.Early in the film, Camille tells a story about control. The moral? Gods used to control man's fate, now money reigns supreme; Smith's Invisible Hand has replaced God's ("I know how God's feel!" Prokosch remarks). Money itself results in Paul being trapped in an interesting double-bind. Paul succumbs to Prokosch's offers - compromising his artistic integrity and also his beliefs in communism - so that he has enough cash to pay for an apartment for he and Camille. But it is precisely Paul's betraying of his values to be with Camille which fills her with further contempt for him. In other words, he wanting to be with her pushes her away from him; he shatters his ideals and so her idealisations of him. Conversely, Camille tears herself away from Paul and embarks on a romance with Prokosch, not solely out of contempt, but also out of love for Paul. In leaving him, she saves him from debasement, allowing him to escape Prokosch."Contempt" ends with a reversal of its first shot. Here a camera tracks Ulysses as he looks for Ithaca, an island which Godard symbolically leaves invisible. The film is powerfully scored by Georges Delerue (lifted by Scorsese for "Casino"), and resembles late Antonioni, Resnais and early Rossellini.Incidentally, Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" is a big homage to "Contempt". Lynch has Godard make a cameo as a director in "Mulholland", ends with "Contempt's" final panning shot and command ("Silenzio!"), has a character called Camilla (whose portfolio is "Contempt's" poster), and his film features the same wigs (now blonde), red towels, sleazy producers, car crashes and fights against gods. Elsewhere Lynch's Club Silencio resembles a casting-call in "Contempt", both with lip-syncing.8.9/10 - Masterpiece.
