Movie #50: Released in 1963, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 103 minutes. New to me!

LetterBoxd score: 3.5 stars

Around halfway through this movie, I got so alarmed that it wasn’t making any sense to me that I paused the movie and went to go talk with Claude about it. Is Lang’s film even a film? What’s the deal with the producer? Why is Bardot so annoyed, but so evasive? And above all, what is going on with this music? Is the whole thing a joke? It just felt like I was missing some crucial bit of context.

Claude talked me down and reassured me that I wasn’t missing some crucial bit of information, and that my reactions were not too crazy. Lang’s film is weird – that’s why the producer threw a fit about it. The music is trying to draw attention to how manipulative it is. And Piccoli is just as confused as me, the viewer, about Bardot’s seeming pivot (though on reflection, neither of us should have been so confused).

The movie grew on me over time, as Piccoli’s desperation about Bardot grew, as his talk with Lang clarified a bit how he was interpreting events, and also just as the movie moved to such a beautiful setting. In particular, Piccoli’s interpretation of the Odyssey is a read of the whole thing: Odysseus, by telling his wife to receive suitors was a signal to Penelope that he didn’t value her, which soured her love on him, such that the only way he could rekindle her love was by proving he was insanely jealous and killing the suitors. This maps pretty clearly to the basic events of Contempt.

But that would also be a bit too neat and tidy, and there are complications. Bardot, for example, doesn’t express such a neat and tidy opinion. She refuses to explain why she has fallen out of love with him; maybe she doesn’t know, maybe she is insulted that she is expected to spell it out for him. And Piccoli continually puts forward a proposal that Odysseus doesn’t love Penelope, which is why he takes ten years to get back to her. And the movie gestures towards an Odyssean ending, with Piccoli carrying a gun presumably to kill the producer. But he doesn’t go through with it, and instead Bardot and the producer are killed in a random car accident.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

It’s another example of a movie about the movie as an art form. There’s a whole meta-textual level, where Fritz Lang’s production of the Odyssey faces meddling from the Producer, while Godard’s production faced meddling by producers. Famously, this was his go at making a movie with a big budget. Apparently, for example, they insisted he add the opening scene where Bardot is nude, because they felt cheated to pay for the casting of Bardot and not getting any skin. A lot of scenes feel like they could be inspired by Godard’s own interactions with his producers. For example, Lang complaining about being forced to use Cinemascope, which is the format this movie is made in.

The music is (apparently) another commentary on the movie as art. It’s beautiful, but deployed very overtly and with random cutoffs, as if to really draw attention to the role its playing in manipulating our emotions.

A certain kind of person really likes this kind of meta-commentary, though I’m not one of them. It feels like its playing to a small audience.

But the movie has other virtues. I think it does a good job depicting a falling out of love. It looks great, especially in the third act. And it does these intriguing fast cuts to earlier scenes in the movie, and even scenes not in the movie, that convey the rush of memories/feelings/associations we have about other people.

But on the whole, this is probably my least favorite movie of the sight and sound lot so far.

Next: Pierrot Le Fou