Les Mepris (1963)
When love walks in the room Everybody stand up Oh it's good, good, good Like Brigitte Bardot
Having recently added Jean Luc Godard to my list of obsessions and trying to work my way through his First Famous Fifteen Feature Films released between 1960 and 1967 last night I watched Le Mepris AKA Contempt for the very first time.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that this was exactly the sort of movie I want to watch several times just in order to enjoy and understand it properly. People have already written reviews of it much better than I ever could. Here’s a few examples:
so I’ll just give my impressions and reactions to seeing it instead.
I’m not sure if this is the first movie where the opening credits are spoken rather than shown?
I know that Harry Nilsson sang all of the end credits for a movies called Skidoo but that was in 1968 and done for comic effect. Here we just see a tracking shot being done of two people walking down a road and only the title of the film itself is shown.
The first time we see the famous Ms. Bardot the screen is completely red as she lies naked on a bed with her husband. For no explicable reason the screen suddenly goes to normal colour and then turns totally blue as she keeps asking her husband what parts of her body she likes. Later on we learn that the initials BB not only stand for Brigitte Bardot but also Bertolt Brecht. The whole film is full of cinematic references, movies are spoken about, in the bath BB quotes aloud from a book she is reading about Fritz Lang who plays the director of the film version of Homer’s Odyssey that they are trying to make.
Producer Jack Palance, Director Lang and the main protagonist and his wife go to see de Sica’s Voyage to Italy, there are posters of some of Godard’s favourite movies show in the background at various times. We get a few disconcerting jump cuts as the first meeting of Ms Bardot and Mr. Palance are repeated during voice overs later on in the film. Sound is played with at various times to disconcerting effect. Godard even makes Bardot wear a black wig that makes her look like Anna Karina.
This is the first colour film I’ve seen made by Godard and it was also shot in Cinemascope “Good for showing snakes and funerals” according to Lang. A film of the Odyssey needs a German director because the man who rediscovered Troy in modern times is also German. When Palance is told that Fritz Lang abandoned his German film career to escape Hitler and the Nazie he retorts that "...this is not ‘33. This is 63”
I love the use of colour in this film with the emphasis on blue, red and white that he also shows in his other colour films. The soundtrack by George Delerue is beautiful. The location shooting at Casa Malaparte on the isle of Capri is incredible.
There are too many quotes to choose from the film. The best ones are here.
I cannot recommend this film enough
