Le Mépris falls into a long list of great films about the process of filmmaking. It’s based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, A Ghost at Noon, but like most of the times Godard “adapted” a book it’s very loosely connected. Moravia was an Italian existentialist writer who was adapted often: he wrote the source novels for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women. Godard got the full support of Moravia to make the film and for his changes, something he would not do with Made in U.S.A., which ironically meant that author Donald E. Westlake’s legal action stopped that film from being shown in the USA for decades.
Godard originally conceived the film’s central couple with Kim Novak and Frank Sinatra in mind. The Italian producer Carlo Ponti was after Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastriano. This conflict of visions put the two of them at loggerheads from the get-go. Anna Karina claims that Godard met with Monica Vitti, whose tardiness put Godard off—and, as Karina said, Vitti was “staring out the window like she wasn’t interested at all.” Eventually, the producer demanded Brigitte Bardot and made Godard insert more “sexy” shots of Bardot to sell the film to the world market.
The film concerns an American producer played by Jack Palance who hires Fritz Lang to direct a version of The Odyssey. He also hires novelist Paul Javal, played by Luis Buñuel regular Michel Piccoli, to work on the script. Most of the film deals with the conflict that occurs when the screenwriter’s artistic expression comes up against the commercial potential of the film, paralleling Godard’s own issues of the time with his producer, and the strained relationship between the novelist-turned-screenwriter and his wife (Bardot).
Lang plays a fictionalized version of himself who espouses Godard’s theories on film, and is the director hired to make The Odyssey. Interestingly Lang had already directed his final film, whether he knew it or not, and he was already pretty blind by this point. Godard himself plays Lang’s assistant director in one of his more memorable on-screen roles. The production wasn’t a happy one for Jean-Luc, who was intrigued by the idea of making a bigger-budget film with some American backing, but in the end hated the production.
Le Mépris is one of the key Godard films of this golden era, and for many it’s his very best film. I wouldn’t go that far—I prefer his genre exercises, whether it’s Alphaville or Bande à Part. But if you haven’t experienced the film, it’s absolutely classic and you should certainly seek it, out even if it’s only for Raoul Coutard’s lush CinemaScope photography of Capri and Bardot at her peak, before she became an insane fascist.
The new 4K restoration looks great: the location photography is some of the best of Godard’s period when he made proper films. The release includes both a UHD disc and a Blu-Ray disc. The UHD has the Colin McCabe introduction and some shorts that lesser-known French New Waver Jacques Rozier made around the time of Le Mépris’s production. The aforementioned extras are also on the Blu-Ray disc, but are also joined by a lengthy 2009 documentary about the film and the film’s trailer. The Essential Godard boxset from Studiocanal has some exclusive extras, including a lengthy archival interview between Godard and Lang, so you will want to keep that—and why wouldn’t you, it has Alphaville and Pierriot le Fou, which are even better!
★★★★★
Ian Schultz
psychotroniccinema.com 