The title of Jean-Luc Godard’s first movie in colour is not misbegotten. Contempt (Le Mépris in French) was the one thing not in short supply when the film-maker decamped to Cinecitta Studios in Rome to make a film of an Alberto Moravia novel (for which he had equal contempt) about the making of a film of Homer’s Odyssey. Godard hated his overbearing and cartoonish big-money producers Joseph E Levine and Carlo Ponti – he called them “King Kong” and “Mussolini” respectively – and stirred elements of their personalities into that of his on-screen producer, the boorish, money-driven philistine Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance). The exasperated Palance’s contempt for Godard’s working methods was also worked into the film itself.
Just about the only figure immune to JLG’s dark moods was the director of the movie within the movie, Fritz Lang, playing himself, an idol of Godard and his fellow Cahiers du Cinema upstarts. Here, Lang is as put-upon a figure within the movie as Godard felt himself to be without it, a monocled Homer attempting to control – or at least direct – his screenwriter (Michel Piccoli), the screenwriter’s wife (Bardot), and his producer, who themselves might be deemed modern-day versions of Odysseus, Penelope and the god Poseidon. Meanwhile, within the movie, Piccoli and Bardot – the former declares he loves the latter “totally, tenderly, tragically” – exhibit obvious parallels with Godard and his then-wife/muse/regular star Anna Karina, whose marriage was on the rocks, as usual.
Out of what seemed like chaos, however, Godard produced one of his most exquisite and approachable movies, finally graduating to colour (using his genius cinematographer Raoul Coutard) as though he were to the Technicolor manner born, and using the same red-versus-blue colour scheme he’d admired in Otto Preminger’s Mediterranean-set, Cahiers-beloved Bonjour Tristesse. Indeed, his primary colours are as important a feature of his colour film-making henceforth as his stars or his script (which was a back-of-a-napkin narrative shred, as usual).
The movie’s most famous set-piece is its virtuoso central panel (it’s a triptych), in which Bardot (in a Karina black wig) and Piccoli (wearing Godard’s own clothes) circle each other in their apartment as their marriage waxes and wanes, Coutard’s camera tracking to accommodate each character as they dress and undress, bicker, reconcile and bicker again. As much as he is experimenting with cinematic form, Godard is also riffing on his own life and lovers. Never again would he integrate the two as effortlessly and watchably as here, as he dismantles and examines the nexus of relations between art and commerce, poetry and prose, Europe and America, la Nouvelle Vague and the studio system.
