le mépris (w&d godard)

I figure it must have been in 1983, there or thereabouts, that my erstwhile friend Jason took me to a double bill at the Electric on Portobello Road of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Le Mépris. Back then the Electric was still a fleapit. I have a vague memory that we entered in daylight and exited into the night. That serendipitous shifting of the spectrum which seems to have been caused by the clash between light and darkness that cinema constructs. I was seventeen, I believe, and that screening of Le Mepris has always remained as a keystone in the process of falling in love with cinema. It has been, entonces, nearly forty years since I last watched the film. I guess it must have been in part Bardot herself, but my greatest memory of the film was of the shimmering Mediterranean which Godard’s film, a film about the making of a film of the Odyssey, a quintessential Mediterranean text, celebrates. The quality of the light from that far-flung world must have dazzled, all the more so to then emerge into the darkness of the London winter night.

How much has altered. When I watched it I would have been younger than all the cast and they would have seemed like gods to me. The trials and tribulations of relationships, around which the narrative is constructed, would still have seemed like a foreign land. I imagine I would have had no idea who Fritz Lang was, let alone Piccoli. Watching it yesterday, only the immortalised Lang would be older than me. The film within a film is about gods and men, although this is part of a sly game, because in the modern world, rather than the grecian one, the film stars have become gods. Bardot is an effigy of beauty, Palance of unredacted masculinity, Lang a sagacious world weariness. If any director filmed actors with an awareness that he was constructing a panoply of Homeric immortals, it was probably Godard, faithful to the first three letters of his surname.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Le Mépris, a story told in three acts, is the way in which Godard reins in his ironic detachment. This is a drama, in the conventional sense, with conventional narrative beats and characterisation. The characters are at once less obviously his puppets than in other films, and more so, subsumed as they are in the meta-drama of his personal narrative which underpins the film. (Filmmakers struggling with the complications of being both ambitious, beautiful, and human.) The extended scene between Bardot and Piccoli, which makes up the second act, foregoes the winks at the camera, permitting the actors to remain absorbed in the budding tragedy of their characters’ failed relationship.

With Delarue’s delirious strings, Raoul Coutard’s crystalline cinematography and the plasticity of the small cast, this is almost a model for what a film might be, a mix of the romantic and the intellectual, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. No wonder it seduced me back then, a young man on the brink of his journey into the big wide world of gods and monsters.