LE MEPRIS

Aka Contempt (US), Il disprezzo (I)
1963
France/Italy
A Compagnia Cinematografica Champion, Les Films Concordia & Rome Paris Films production
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Story: Based on 'Il disprezzo' by Alberto Moravia
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Georges Delarue, Piero Piccioni (Italian version)
Editor: Agnès Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan
Original running length: 103 mins
Filmed: Capri, Rome (Italy)
Cast: Brigitte Bardot (Camille Javal), Michel Piccoli (Paul Javal), Jack Palance (Jeremy Prokosch), Giorgia Moll (Francesca Vanini), Fritz Lang (himself)
Uncredited: Raoul Coutard (the cameraman), Jean-Luc Godard (Lang's assistant director), Linda Veras (a siren)

This title is available from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk on DVD

Five reasons to watch Le Mépris

•  The Good Life

For fans of European film like myself, the setting of Le Mépris exerts an almost irresistible allure. The Golden Age of Italian Cinema - from the late fifties to the late sixties - was a wild, wacky and unbelievable time. It was a time of charlatans and geniuses, of trend-setters and sycophants, a time that has now all but gone, and with it the frisson and breadth of the native cinema industry.

The film features Michel Piccoli as Paul, a playwright who is cajoled into working on the screenplay for an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey to be directed by Fritz Lang (played, natch, by Fritz Lang). Paul is in two minds about the project, the money appeals - as does the idea of 'treating' such a classic - but he's reluctant to embrace the crassness of the cinematic medium. All of which, of course, means that he has to mingle with the Roman movers and shakers and that a steadicam camera is never far in the background.

•  Ol' craggy face

The main producer that Paul has to deal with is a peculiar character called Jeremy Prokosch. Jeremy Prokosch is played by Jack Palance, who was making a living in bigger-budgeted exploitation pictures at the time. Always an intensely watchable and rather eccentric actor, here he puts in a bravura performance: constantly on the verge of a violent mood, given to irrelevant quotations and equally stand-offish and predatory. He's worth the price of admission alone.

•  It's the look, babe

Of course, if you're going to have someone with a face like Jack Palance in a film, you need to make sure that you have a cinematographer in control who knows how to actually shoot a picture properly. Raoul Coutard does the job admirably, capturing that archetypal 60s look to the full. There's a lovely widescreen feel to proceedings - one character even proclaims his love for Cinemascope - which you simply don't get in contemporary cinema. This is all enhanced by some great locations, most notably an astonishingly designed villa on the coast of the Isle of Capri.

•  Peplum, Godard style

The funniest parts of the film are unquestionably the short excerpts that Lang is supposed to have shot for his 'works in progress. Possibly taking the mickey out of the, achem, understated acting style of most peplum stars, Godard has these winsome snippets performed by. statues. Well, it made me laugh. Another little snipe at the genre is in Paul's previous writing credit, 'Toto Against Hercules' (not, unfortunately, a real film, unlike Toto contro Maciste, directed by Ferdinando Cerchio in 1962).

Of course, being a Godard film, this features layers of intertextuality, the most prominent of which is the connection between the characters of The Odyssey and those that appear in the in the film itself: Paul is a de-facto Odysseus, Camille can be seen as Penelope and Prokosch - with his aforementioned coastal residence - Poseidon. Unfortunately, whereas The Odyssey used the framework of an epic journey to convey the nature of humanity, Le Mepris uses a journey up its director's own rectum to convey absolutely nothing.

•  Le chapeau

Michel Piccoli wears his hat throughout the entire running time of the film, even while taking a bath. Whatever language you speak, that's cool.

Five reasons to avoid Le Mépris like the plague

•  Bardot uncovered

Female characters in French Art Movies tend to be a pretty torrid lot, and Brigitte Bardot's character here is possibly the most irritating of the bunch. After spending the first five minutes asking whether Paul loves her toes, knees and backside, she then gets in a huff and does everything possible to be downright annoying for the rest of the film. When she finally pops her clogs it's all very rewarding, but also 90 minutes too late.

•  Life in the Slow Lane

For someone who revered filmmakers like Hitchcock and, yes, Fritz Lang, Godard seems to have learned very little about the art of pacing from them. Le Mépris is slow. Very slow. The scenes are drawn out, the action - as in anything at all happening - minimal and the constant talk, talk, talk grating. This problem is undoubtedly exacerbated by the experience of viewing the film on DVD, where one is painfully aware of the counter ticking away under the screen. In fact, watching the seconds pass by is far more exciting than watching the darned film, meaning that the whole experience is comparable to nothing so much as enduring a really boring day in a job you don't like.

•  Self indulgent, moi?

This shares a problem with Godard's best known film, arthouse favourite Au bout de soufflé: it's got a neat premise and the potential to be a classic, but it's crippled by a fatal level of self-indulgence. Did I mention that there's a lot of talk? Well, there is, it simply doesn't stop, and it's all rubbish. All of the characters pontificate at length about whatever passing interest has caught their fancy, all of which is carried out with the deluded self-importance of students in the union bar. Their primary subject matter, of course, is themselves, and they also go on about this at endless lengths. Now there's nothing wrong with dialogue in a film - I'm not advocating a return to the silent era by any means - but this isn't dialogue, its drivel. And its drivel that thinks its saying something relevant.

One of Godard's trademarks was to turn every single film he made into a comment upon the process of filmmaking, which is fascinating if you're in the industry but a little insular otherwise. Here, he uses the story to comment - with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer in the face - upon his relationship with producer Carlo Ponti. This was intended as the director's 'mainstream' piece, with a-grade stars, and the relationship between the two was fractious. Prokosch's crude rejection of Lang's 'masterpiece' represents Ponti's urge to commercialise the director's 'artistic vision' (for instance, by including nude scenes of Bardot). Godard being Godard, though, he doesn't have the wit to realise that the film within a film is so ludicrous that Prokosch is absolutely correct in having the temerity to reject what is, evidently, a load of old rubbish. It should also, perhaps, be pointed out that Ponti also acted as the producer for - amongst other things - Damiano Damiani's Arturo's Island (62) & Antonioni's Blow Up (66), both of which are far better, and far more intelligent, than anything that Godard ever came up with.

•  And coming next.

Maybe it's just that I'm watching it retrospectively, but this has to be one of the most predictable films I've ever seen. You know exactly what's going to happen - more talking, mainly - from the first minute. If you're fooled into believing a climax or conclusion is going to be reached, you've obviously not seen enough French art movies; it's like watching a giallo with a priest in it and not expecting him to be the killer. The trouble is that these films - which were so concerned with breaking boundaries - now seem awfully generic.

•  People like us

As with 80s pop group The Smiths, one of the most annoying things about Godard are his fans. Let's be clear here: people who claim to like this are more likely to like looking clever than they actually like films. If you're looking for clever-clever riffs on the Italian film industry from this time, Fellini's La dolce vita or even De Sica's After the Fox are both far more watchable and, ultimately, far more insightful than the void that is Le Mépris .

Matt Blake