Film: Le Mepris
Release date: 5th April 2010
Certificate: 15
Running time: 99 mins
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Starring: Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, Michel Piccoli, Fritz Lang
Genre: Drama
Studio: Optimum
Format: DVD
Country: France/Italy
Le Mepris is one of those films that divides critics and cineastes strongly. Some unreservedly hail it as a modern masterpiece of European cinema, while others find it a cold, detached film whose visual style doesn't compensate for its general sense of ennui.
1963, the south of Italy. Novelist Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is hired by the unsentimental American film producer Jerry Prokasch (Jack Palance) to rewrite a script for a film version of Homer's 'The Odyssey'. Paul takes the assignment for two reasons - the $10,000 being offered for the rewrite work, with which payment Paul intends to purchase in full the airy flat he rents to please his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) - and because he admires and is flattered to have the chance to work with the film's famous director, Fritz Lang (playing himself).
But from the moment he signs up for the work, he begins to lose the respect of his wife Camille. The reasons for Camille's sudden and escalating contempt for Paul are left somewhat mysterious, though she does tell him she preferred him when he was writing novels, and she also seems to resent the casualness with which he allowed the aggressive Prokasch (Palance at his wolfish best) to whisk her away from him early on in the film.
Camille accompanies Paul to the isle of Capri, where Lang is in the process of filming his version of The Odyssey, while Paul tries in a desultory kind of way to work out a fresh angle to the script, and Camille spends a fair bit of time sunbathing nude. When her contempt for Paul reaches an irreversible zenith, she leaves Capri as the mistress of Prokasch.
After a surprise twist, we are left with a final image of the actor playing Odysseus in Lang's film, looking out across the Tyrrhenian Sea heroically, perhaps intended as an ironic contrast to Paul, the classic modern man of indecision and self-doubt…
The film critic David Thomson included it in his book 'Have You Seen...?' (2008) as one of the thousand movies he felt his readers should see, but at the same time he also remarks that this is where he feels the director Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless, Alphaville) starts to show his own developing contempt for movies and their part in the capitalist system that would lead to him abandoning filmmaking at the end of the ‘60s for more than a decade (and return mostly only to deconstruct and critique the process).
Perhaps so, but Le Mepris packs an emotional punch very much because of the film's cool, detached approach to the story. The opening scene of Camille and Paul lying naked in bed and speaking intimately to one another may, as Thomson claims, have been a cynical concession to producers keen to have the commercial appeal of nude scenes with Bardot, but it still has a genuine eroticism (in a poetic sense, rather than as an upgraded name for sexploitation) found in only a handful of great films.
The viewer will be disappointed if they come to the film looking for a strong plot or logical character development, but if they look at it more as a kind of poem on modern love masquerading as a film, there is a great deal to enjoy here. JC
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