‘Excelled only by Pierrot le Fou in the spelling out of utter tragedy’: Godard’s Le Mépris reviewed in 1970

Two identical betrayals followed by two increasingly bitter arguments chart the dissolution of Paul and Camille’s marriage. Between them Godard places an interlude of tormented calm: the scene at a cinema where Prokosch auditions a girl who will agree to strip off for him next day and where the film that follows (of which Camille glimpses the opening) is Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia.

The cascading warmth, pathos, and sheer ingenuity of this sequence – the relished awfulness of the audition itself, the brazen eradication of all background noise whenever the principals speak, the joke about BB (Brecht, of course), and above all the unforced reminder of the marital stasis so achingly suffered by the couple in Rossellini’s film – these are the things that with a remarkably forceful pang make one wish that Godard still made them now like he did then.

In 1963, the year, too, of Godard’s other Rossellini film Les Carabiniers, his form of cinema was still more than holding its own against the distant clouds of political engagement ­– and cinema, for Godard, still meant love, life and tragedy on a grand Hollywoodisé scale, references to Hitchcock, Hawks, Garbo, and all.

At the same time, personal anguish was creeping in already as a sinister undercurrent. “I am convinced,” [Raoul] Coutard told an interviewer at the time, “that Godard is trying to explain something to his wife in Le Mépris. It’s a sort of letter ­– one that’s costing Beauregard a million dollars.”  

Characteristically, and because they are the fundamental cause of all Godard’s crises, his letter is full of contradictions, ambiguities, uncertainties – all, perversely enough, that can be relied upon is the written word which does not change.

The close-up of Camille’s closing line is terrible in its finality, more drastic, more meaningful because less transient, than anything she has previously spoken. The film is constructed upon the existence of written opinions, embracing everything from Homer to cheques, a series of interlocking writings which throw up another dreaded obstacle: the problem of interpretation. In Prokosch’s Odyssey the wife is fickle, in Paul’s the husband; only [Fritz] Lang’s pragmatic version, with its denial of fatalism and staunch defence of common sense (“To kill a rival in love solves nothing”) seems likely to survive.

Yet if Lang prefers to dispense with the gods, Godard insists on keeping them around – thrust a little ignominiously into the role of Chorus, to be sure, but sustaining, with an insidious subtlety, their proper spheres of influence.

Neptune, enemy of Ulysses (and implicitly of Paul), sweeps his arm across the screen on both occasions that Camille is carried away; it is into the sea, Neptune’s domain, that Camille vanishes after her final quarrel with her husband.

Minerva, fickle champion of heroes, is the placid supervisor of Paul and Camille’s moments of elation, as when they arrive jubilantly at their Rome apartment. And Godard compounds this subtlety with his use of colour. Broadly, Le Mépris is told in terms of blue and red, with yellow as a neutral shade; superficially, blue (the shade of Paul’s suit, Camille’s headband) represents equilibrium, red (the glaring colour of Prokosch’s car) the customary mood of menace.

Neptune’s eyes, however, are painted blue, and Minerva’s red – an apparent contradiction of their allegiances until one realises that it is blue, after all, that the couple needs to fear most: the colour of the sea, of Camille’s outfit in the car at the end, the colour, in short, of independence and passionless tranquillity.

It is Paul, not Prokosch, who destroys the marriage, even though Camille’s first entry into the abruptly accelerating car is deliberately filmed in the same way as her last – as if she had been lost to Paul from the moment the vehicle shot between them. Godard’s letter is self-accusatory, and with its naked longing it has surely only been excelled by Pierrot le Fou in the spelling out of utter tragedy.

  ► Le Mépris is screening in select UK cinemas now and is available on 4K UHD, Blu-Ray and DVD from 26 June.