38. Contempt

From the opening credits of this film, it’s clear you’re in for something different. Instead of seeing text, the credits are narrated to the audience as we watch a cinemascope camera perform a tracking shot. This film will continue to play with our expectations, and it doesn’t waste any time announcing it.

When I was in undergrad, a friend was taking a class on Godard and needed to write a paper comparing a Godard film to a similar US/Hollywood studio film. I remember suggesting comparing this film to Indecent Proposal. There’s some similar tensions, like in the way that a wealthy man inserts himself into a marriage. But there’s no explicit deal being made here. Camille suspects that Paul is allowing American film producer Jeremy Prokosch to spend time with her as a quid pro quo for hiring him to work on the script for a film. That suspicion grows into contempt, ending the marriage.

There’s also a satire of international movie production, with an American producer hiring Fritz Lang and a French writer to adapt The Odyssey. Multiple scenes feature people speaking in different languages with Prokosch’s assistant, Francesca, offering commentary in how she translates between them. The scenes we do see of the work in progress are experimental and off-kilter, suggesting another kind of problem of translation: adapting an over 2,000-year-old work of prose into a film.

But for all its stylistic strangeness and layers of meta-textual commentary, the heart of the film is an extended sequence in Paul and Camille’s apartment where the two argue while moving between rooms. You can see a diagram of the apartment layout and the paths of the characters in this article. It is raw, bitter, and you can’t look away.

That’s one of the things that sticks with me about this film. It’s constantly pointing out the artificiality of making a movie, reminding you you’re watching a movie, and still managing to get you caught up in whether or not these two fictional characters will resolve their conflict, or if their marriage is over.

It’s like a magician teaching you how a trick is done, but still holding on to just enough surprises and mystery to let you hold on to your sense of wonder.

I know this is a trick, but it’s an impressive trick, and it’s performed by someone confident in their abilities.