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March 08, 2008
Contempt (1963, ****)
Contempt remains a revelation, a shockingly accessible masterpiece amid Godard's intermittently difficult canon. Michel Piccoli plays Paul Javal, a playwright who needs money, and the producer Prokosch is embodied by Jack Palance, that heavy among heavies. He's waving a packet of cash in Paul's direction to doctor a script of "The Odyssey" being directed by Fritz Lang. "I like gods," Palance purrs, "I like them very much." While Contempt plays out over a long Italian weekend, climaxing at Malaparte, an architectural marvel of a villa at Capri, it is also a romantic epic, the abiding, naked pain of its characters washing away all the intellectualizing. Paul's beautiful young wife is Camille, played with momentous petulance by Brigitte Bardot. Paul asks whether he should write the script. Camille tells him it's fine. Later she feels he hasn't shown enough concern when Prokosch has been forward with her. No matter what Paul does, it will not be enough. Camille seizes on excuses, any excuses, to dismiss Paul's adoration. She remembers the love she once thought they had: "Everything used to happen instinctively, in complicitous ecstasy." In his screenplay, Godard wrote, "In contrast to Paul, who always acts on the strength of a complicated series of rationalizations, Camille acts nonpsychologically.... Though one might wonder about her, as Paul does, she never wonders about herself. "She lives full and simple sentiments, and cannot imagine analyzing them. At the end, the camera looks out onto the ocean, the horizon. Limitless possibility or infinite distance? The space between you and I, the space between a man, a woman. The sparkling azure of the sea is the crashing gulf between them. It is unfathomably huge. (Contempt opens Friday at Film Forum in Manhattan.) [Ray Pride.]
Posted by Ray Pride at March 8, 2008 08:14 AM
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