Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (33 page)

Stressful times at Cinecittà
(Strand Releasing/Photofest)

seven.

CONTEMPT

“It’s the end of the cinema”

I
N 1963, TWO OF
G
ODARD’S CINEMATIC WISHES WERE FUL
-filled; in both cases, the reality proved disappointing. Godard’s first contact with a Hollywood producer revealed to him the decadence of a system that had generated the cinema that he loved. The contradiction would prove unbearable. He had long wanted to work with Brigitte Bardot, whose performance in Roger Vadim’s
Et Dieu… créa la femme (… And God Created Woman)
from 1956, had seemed to him and his friends at Cahiers like a riotous, erotic intrusion of brash youth into the sclerotic French film industry. But working with Bardot, and dealing with her demands and her celebrity, turned out to be difficult.

Toward the end of 1962, Georges de Beauregard learned that Bardot had expressed in an interview a desire to work with Godard. The producer offered her the lead role in Godard’s adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel
Contempt
, about a screenwriter and his failing marriage. Earlier in the year, Godard had discussed the project with Beauregard’s partner, Carlo Ponti, who had the film rights,
¹
but it had stalled over casting issues (Godard wanted Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak, Ponti offered Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni). Bardot accepted the role, and on the basis of her involvement, Beauregard and Ponti were able to raise a budget of $1 million, much of it from the American film producer and distributor Joseph E. Levine, who had entered into a four-film partnership with Ponti. For Godard, the sum was unprecedented.

Bardot signed the contract on January 7, 1963, while Godard was still filming
Les Carabiniers
. Much as he welcomed the opportunity to work with her, he anticipated that her involvement would inevitably entail complications.

The celebrity of Bardot, known throughout France simply as “B.B.”
(pronounced “bébé,” meaning “baby”), was extraordinary. According to a 1957 poll, “She occupies 47% of French conversations; she is the number-one subject of discussion, ahead of politics, which gets only 41% of the votes.”
²
She was a one-woman engine of gossip and scandal. Her relationships with Vadim and the actors Jacques Charrier and Sami Frey—as well as her suicide attempts—all fed her tabloid charisma.

There seemed to be no limit to Bardot’s fame. In November 1961, the OAS, the French terrorist group fighting against Algerian independence, sent her a threatening letter demanding fifty thousand francs. Bardot’s reaction was courageous and rousing: she gave
L’Express
the letter to publish and added a contemptuous response, which read in part, “I won’t play along, because I don’t want to live in a Nazi country.”
³
Her defiance won the praise of such diverse figures as French president Charles de Gaulle, Jean-Paul Sartre’s secretary Jean Cau, and the editors of the
Communist daily L’Humanité
.

When she signed on for Contempt, Bardot was both a celebrity and a national hero. She had also somewhat outgrown the movies that had made her famous. After her revelation in…
And God Created Woman
, the glorified starlet appeared in a series of trashy films. Following her appearance in early 1962 in Vadim’s
Le Repos du guerrier
(The Warrior’s Rest), she declared that she was taking an extended break, both to choose her projects more carefully and to escape the relentless hounding of the sensational press.
⁴
Bardot was twenty-eight; she was famous but not a respected actress.
Contempt
would mark her widely anticipated return to the cinema after the voluntary layoff. If she lent the New Wave her box-office power, Godard was lending her its artistic and critical allure.

The project had begun with Ponti’s plan to produce a film for Godard that, he said, for once would have a real script, which the producer expected to be based on the novel. Godard called Moravia’s novel itself the script and promised to follow it closely. That sufficed for Ponti, but not for Joseph E. Levine, who demanded something like a traditional film script. Godard complied, but in an unusual way: he waited until the casting was completed, and, instead of imagining the film on the sole basis of Moravia’s novel, he wrote his script in specific relation to the actors who would play the main roles, and began it with a nineteen-page prelude regarding the characters and the performers.

The novel’s plot concerned the making of a film, the conflicts between director and producer over the film, and the reflection of those conflicts in the relationship of the film’s screenwriter and his wife. In his script, Godard’s descriptions of his characters and the actors who would play them set up with literary flair his view of the story, which, of course, turned out to be another view of his differences with Anna Karina. The trouble, as he described it here, was the incompatibility of a reflective man and an instinctive woman.

Godard said of the film’s main character, the screenwriter—the second in the series of Godard-like Pauls initiated in
Vivre sa vie
—“Paul Javal
⁵
is the first of my characters who is realistic, whose psychology can be explained—at a purely psychological level.”
⁶
The character seemed realistic to Godard, of course, because it was so closely based on himself.

To play the role, Godard turned to a thirty-five-year-old French actor, Michel Piccoli, who worked mostly in theater, but whose performance in a 1957 French police movie,
Rafles sur la ville
(Roundups in the City), Godard had praised in Cahiers. The screenplay description of Paul is the longest and fullest. As the director’s stand-in, Paul is the character whose mind Godard knew best. Paul is a writer who does small jobs in the cinema but really wants to write a play. His problems with his wife are caused by his overwrought analysis of clear emotions: “He does not know how to live in the fullness and the simplicity of the present moment, whence his disarray and irreparable blunders.” One reason for this is his inability to experience his own life first-hand; instead he conceives it as a reflection of the cinema: “Paul almost always wears a hat, like the Dean Martin of
Some Came Running
.”

Bardot would play Paul’s wife, Camille, “a young woman of 27 or 28, French or of French origin,” who is, as Godard wrote, “very pretty, she resembles Eve in a painting by Piero della Francesca.”

But as opposed to her husband, who always acts as a result of a series of complicated reasonings, Camille acts non-psychologically, so to speak, by instinct, a sort of vital instinct like a plant which needs water to continue to live.

   The living drama between her and Paul, her husband, comes from the fact that she exists on a purely vegetal level, whereas he lives on an animal level.
⁷

In
Contempt
, Godard filmed a woman’s emotions as an irresistible force of nature. Yet he claimed that Camille’s “non-psychology” was less a function of the role than of the actress: “If I’d had another actress to play Camille Javal, the film would have had a much more pronounced psychological aspect. But then the film would have been much more unbearable.”
⁸
Unbearable, at least, for Godard, who did not want to imagine that Camille could stop loving Paul on the basis of a rational decision rather than through the blind force of her nature.

Jeremiah Prokosch, the producer who hires Paul for a writing assignment, would be played by the American actor Jack Palance. Prokosch/Palance, Godard wrote in the script, has the face of “an Asiatic bird of prey… As with many producers, he likes to humiliate and to offend his employees and friends and always behaves with them, his entourage, like a little Roman emperor.” Prokosch’s fierce desires and flamboyant energy exert a powerful influence on
the lives of Paul and Camille. He himself would suffer a fall, but not before bringing down everyone around him.

The most eminent of Prokosch’s employees is the director, Fritz Lang, who plays himself as the director of the
Odyssey
, the film that Prokosch is producing and that Paul is hired to rewrite. Born in Vienna in 1890, Lang was one of the great directors of the silent era, with
Metropolis
and
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler;
in the sound era, he made
M
and
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
before leaving Germany for France in 1933. The next year, Lang went to Hollywood, where he had an impressive career, directing twenty-two films (including such classics as
You Only Live Once, Rancho Notorious
, and
The Big Heat)
. In 1960, in West Germany, he made
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
, which turned out to be his last film, but at the time of Contempt, Lang still nourished hopes of directing another (in particular, a remake of
M
called
And Tomorrow, Murder
). In his script, Godard wrote of Lang’s unimpeachable integrity:

Thirty years ago, or almost, Goebbels summoned Lang to his office and asked him to run the entire German cinema. That evening, Lang packed his bags and crossed the border.
⁹

   Paul will recount this to Jeremiah Prokosch, pointing out that one cannot get such a man to give in, unless he wants to.

Godard intended Lang to be “the conscience of the film, the moral hyphen that joins Ulysses’s odyssey to that of Camille and Paul.”

If Lang was the film’s “moral hyphen,” its linguistic hyphen would be Prokosch’s secretary, Francesca Vanini (her last name derived from Rossellini’s 1961 film of Stendhal’s
Vanina Vanini)
, the ubiquitous interpreter who serves as the link between the characters’ polyglot dialogue—Lang’s German, Palance’s English, Piccoli and Bardot’s French, and the Italian of the locals. The character was played by the Italian actress Georgia Moll, whom Godard had praised highly in 1958 for her multilingual role in Joseph Mankiewicz’s
The Quiet American
. Francesca, like Lang, has emerged from the wreckage of history: “Francesca, [Prokosch’s] press secretary, is as much his slave as his secretary. He saved her, at the end of the war, from a German concentration camp, and never lets her forget it.”

The story of
Contempt
concerns Paul Javal’s first big job: an offer from Jeremiah Prokosch to rewrite the script of the
Odyssey
. Paul, accompanied by Camille, arrives at a dilapidated lot in Cinecittà in Rome, unsure whether to accept the job of redoing the story according to the producer’s psychoanalytical view: namely, that Ulysses left home to fight in the Trojan War and took ten years to return because he had not been getting along with Penelope. Prokosch
is sure that the writer will accept the job, for the money. “How do you know?” Javal asks. The producer answers, “Because I hear that you have a very beautiful wife.”

The couple join Prokosch for a drink at his villa. Camille, who senses the producer’s intentions, accuses Paul of using her to ingratiate himself with Prokosch, who invites her to be his guest on location in Capri where Lang is shooting the
Odyssey
.

Back at their blandly modern apartment, Camille and Paul have a long domestic scene. A series of disputes—including whether she will accept Prokosch’s invitation to go to Capri, whether Paul will take the job, and whether Camille loves him—culminate in Paul’s slaps and Camille’s flat declaration that she has contempt for him and no longer loves him.

The film then moves to Capri; Paul has taken the job, and Camille has gone with him to the producer’s villa there. (Godard had secured as the main location the modernist masterwork Villa Malaparte, a flat-roofed structure built atop a promontory that is reached by a sweeping triangular staircase.) From the rooftop terrace, Paul sees Camille kissing Prokosch. He confronts Camille and then informs Prokosch that he will not do the script. Camille reproaches Paul for jeopardizing the project when they need the money, declaring again that she has contempt for him and no longer loves him. She leaves Capri with Prokosch.

In the producer’s Alfa-Romeo, Camille tells Prokosch of her plans to find work in Rome as a typist. As the car lurches onto the highway, it is crushed by a truck; both Camille and Prokosch are killed. Back on the set, Paul, upon hearing the news, quits the project and plans to return to Paris to write his play. Fritz Lang continues to direct his film of the
Odyssey
.

G
ODARD’S MAJOR CHANGES
to the novel’s plot rendered the film all the more personal. First, he put the screenwriter to work not on a future film of the
Odyssey
(as in the novel) but as the rewriter of a film already under way, turning
Contempt
into a movie that shows the making of an international coproduction like
Contempt
itself. Second, though in Moravia’s novel it is the director, Rheingold, who had artistic reasons for turning the
Odyssey
into a modern psychoanalytic study of an unhappy couple, in Godard’s film it is the producer who wants to vulgarize the
Odyssey
as a modern romance for commercial reasons, and whose view Paul, the screenwriter, adopts. Godard—who had entered discussions with Carlo Ponti about the project shortly after the marital crisis of late 1961—presents himself as the worst sort of cinematic sinner, one who betrays his own artistic sense to insinuate himself into the mainstream film business, in the hope of making more money and making his wife happy. In
Contempt
, Godard suggests that, far
from collaborating with Karina in the cinema, he felt he was supporting her by way of it, perverting his own artistic dreams to do so, and thereby losing the integrity for which she had loved him.