Godard announces, before his film begins, that cinema replaces reality with desire. What Contempt cannot see is that the announcement is not the same as the refusal.
NOTICE TO THE READER
This review contains a blind spot.
The blind spot concerns what happens to the woman at the end of the film.
The reviewer was aware of it before writing.
The review proceeds anyway.
This is, as it happens, also the film’s situation.
| Director | Jean-Luc Godard |
|---|---|
| Year | 1963 |
| Runtime | 103 minutes |
| Cast | Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll |
| Awards | Nominated for the Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival |
| Streaming | Available on major platforms |
The Decision to Leave review asked whether knowing is the same as being outside the thing you know, and answered: no. Seo-rae knows the genre’s requirement and chooses it anyway. Park Chan-wook knows the investigating gaze is the problem and films through it anyway. Arriving now at Contempt, the archive’s first Godard, the question receives its most theatrical version: Jean-Luc Godard opens his film by pointing the camera at itself, narrating the credits in voiceover, and saying — directly, with no ambiguity — that cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires. This is the most self-aware opening in the archive. The substitution then proceeds for one hundred and three minutes. Bardot is filmed as Bardot has always been filmed. The woman dies at the end so the man can have his conclusion. Knowing was not the same as refusal. It never is.
Contempt was made in 1963 from Alberto Moravia’s novel, produced by an American company that hired Godard on the condition that he film Bardot — at that point the most photographed woman in Europe — in a manner the posters could use. Godard did this, ostentatiously and under protest, in a scene where Paul asks Camille to describe each part of her body and she lies on the bed answering him while Raoul Coutard’s camera tracks across her. The scene is lit in three shifting colours: red, blue, white. It is the most formally declared nude scene in French cinema, each colour change announcing itself as a colour change, the camera’s desire made visible as a formal decision. Godard is showing you that he knows what he is doing.
Then the film moves to Capri and the production of a Fritz Lang Odyssey that nobody wants to make, and to a marriage that dissolves in a single day, and to Camille (Bardot) developing a contempt for her husband Paul (Michel Piccoli) so total that she cannot explain it and will not fully explain it and the film will not explain it for her. Something happened. Paul allowed the American producer Prokosch (Jack Palance) to be alone with Camille. Paul chose his career over her dignity. He did not protect her, or did not protect her in the way she needed, or she looked at him in the moment and saw what he was capable of and could not un-see it. The film keeps the cause slightly out of focus because the cause is not the point. The point is that Camille, once she has seen it, cannot return.
The apartment sequence that follows is twenty-three minutes long, one of the great sustained passages in French cinema: Paul and Camille moving through the rooms of their apartment in Cinecitta, the camera tracking between them as they separate and attempt to reconnect, the widescreen aspect ratio keeping them in the same frame even when they have moved to opposite ends of the space. Godard is using CinemaScope — the format designed for epic landscapes, for the parted Red Sea and the Roman Colosseum — to film a marital argument in a small apartment. The mismatch is the argument. The machinery of grand cinema has been brought to bear on something intimate and failing, and the grandeur makes it worse: every silence is widescreen silence, every failed glance is widescreen failure. The Odyssey Prokosch is filming nearby concerns a man trying to get home. In this apartment, home is where the contempt lives.
Godard built the film around a woman’s intelligence and then organized it around a man’s inadequacy. Camille knows everything that matters. The film gives her nowhere to put what she knows.
Watch Camille in the apartment sequence. She is not performing confusion or distress. She has already arrived at her conclusion and is waiting, with a patience that reads as devastation, for Paul to arrive at his. She answers his questions about what has changed with the flatness of someone who has decided that the full answer would cost more than she has energy to spend. She is right about him. She has been right about him since whatever happened with Prokosch, and the film knows she is right, and the film is organized around Paul’s consciousness — his guilt, his inadequacy, his rationalizations — which means her rightness has nowhere to go. She cannot be the center of a film that is structured as his story. She can only be the evidence for his failure.
Fritz Lang appears throughout as himself, directing the Odyssey on the rocky Capri coast, and his presence is Godard’s most explicit formal gesture: Lang represents the director with uncompromised integrity, the filmmaker who does not sell himself to Prokosch’s vision. He is the film’s moral witness. He watches Paul compromise and says nothing, or says it in the oblique form of Homer. He cannot save the marriage or Camille; he can only continue filming. At the end, when Camille has died in a car accident alongside Prokosch and the road to the villa is empty, Lang calls for silence on set, and the film records this, and there is something in the recording that the formal witness cannot process: the woman is gone and the film is still running.
The cross-reference that creates the sharpest friction is our review of Viaggio in Italia, Rossellini’s 1954 film — also Italy, also a marriage in crisis, also a woman who sees clearly while the man around her remains essentially unchanged, also the ancient world pressing against modern inadequacy. But where Rossellini restores his couple at the end — a miracle in a crowd, a spontaneous declaration — Godard kills his. The difference is not pessimism. It is what each filmmaker believes about the marriage once the woman has seen it clearly. Rossellini believes a marriage can survive being seen clearly, if the landscape is old enough and the moment is right. Godard believes a marriage that has been seen clearly by one person and not the other cannot be survived. He is probably more honest. He is also more convenient: Camille’s death resolves Paul’s situation without requiring Paul to change. Rossellini’s grace required something from both of them. Godard’s tragedy requires something only from her.
Contempt is the most intelligent film in the archive about the conditions under which intelligence fails. Godard announces the substitution before it begins. He films Bardot in the way Bardot must be filmed. He stages the marital dissolution in the grandest possible aspect ratio and watches the grandeur fail to contain it. He casts Fritz Lang as integrity’s witness. He knows everything except how to make a film in which Camille’s knowledge of her husband is the organizing principle rather than the evidence against him. That film would have been different. It would have been shorter, sharper, less beautiful. It would not have Coutard’s light on the Capri water. It would not have ended the way Contempt ends. It is the film Camille deserved and did not get. Most films are.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini, 1954): reviewed here; another marriage in crisis in the Italian landscape, but where the woman is given the grace of a return rather than the finality of a road — and where the comparison with Godard’s ending reveals what each filmmaker believes about what knowledge costs a marriage.
Pierrot le Fou (Godard, 1965): Godard two years later, same formal restlessness, same Coutard light, but with the woman given more of the film’s intelligence and the ending even less willing to pretend it is anything other than what it is.