Out of Focus: A French New Wave classic comes to Santa Monica

In the smoke-filled cafes situated along the Left Bank of the Seine river in Paris, a group of young film critics started talking. Their late-night conversations seeped into the early morning streets and spawned a new kind of cinema: one that was youthful and innovative, playful and rebellious.

 

The movement that these critics-turned-filmmakers would soon create would become known as the French New Wave, and from it would come a revolution in movie making.

One of the greatest films produced within this movement is the enigmatic and picturesque “Contempt,” directed by former film critic Jean-Luc Godard in 1963. The film, recently restored in celebration of its 50th anniversary this past year, will be showing at Laemmle’s Royal Theatre in Santa Monica from Jan. 17 to Jan. 23.

Based partly on a novel by Alberto Moravia, “Contempt” ties together Greek epic poetry with the French New Wave. Michel Piccoli stars as Paul Javal, a playwright hired by an American producer to re-write an adaption of “The Odyssey” for the screen. The story then focuses on artistic disputes and marital struggles between Javal and his wife Camille (played by French siren Brigitte Bardot), amid a cast of famous faces drawn from both Europe and America.

“Contempt” is a film about film. It’s a double-edged sword: a swooning love-letter to movies for their ability to convey and create beauty, and a scathing critique of the filmmaking process, fueled by ulterior motives, superficiality and artistic disagreements.

It is an important work of 1960s cinema, too. “Contempt,” like many early Godard films, has had a significant and lasting influence on the international film community. It has been parodied and alluded to in countless films, such as Martin Scorsese’s “Casino” and Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha,” which both used the haunting string music (composed by Georges Delerue) from its soundtrack. But to truly understand the place that “Contempt” holds in film history, one must consider the context in which it was made.

It’s 1963. Jean-Luc Godard is an artist at the top of his game, the “enfant terrible” of French film. A bona fide master filmmaker, Godard has, over a three year period, just made a string of brilliant movies about chain-smokers who sit around, drink coffee and model themselves after American movie stars. The French New Wave, of which he is a founding member, is now chic.

Film financiers start throwing cash at Godard’s feet in order to stake their claim to a piece of this new film movement. This is where Carlo Ponti, the great Italian movie producer, comes in. Godard tells him about his idea for a new project, entitled “Contempt.” Ponti is game, but there is a catch: He insists it must be filmed in CinemaScope and feature actress Brigitte Bardot nude. The film must make money, he argues, and sex sells. Godard agrees to his demands, and then goes off to Italy to make his movie.

But those who may have hoped that Godard would turn “Contempt” into a commercial film would be disappointed. It is possibly the least mainstream movie shot in CinemaScope ever. It’s beautiful, yes. The entire film has the look of a sweeping Hollywood melodrama, bathed in rich colors that capture a beautiful, sun-drenched Mediterranean landscape – a landscape whose sweltering heat helps bring emotion to its boiling point during the intense marital drama of the second act. But nearly everything else in “Contempt” is a stark contrast to the standard fare of the day.

There is a prolonged 30-minute sequence, for example, where Bardot, in various stages of dress and undress, and Piccoli do nothing but argue with one another in their apartment. There are odd music cues that end as quickly as they begin. There are interjected reminders to the audience that they are watching a film. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard is shown in the opening sequence actually filming the movie, a scene that inspired the final shot of Haskell Wexler’s 1969 film “Medium Cool”. Additionally, the nudity Ponti demanded be in “Contempt” Godard deliberately desexualizes by having Bardot ask Piccoli for reassurance about her body, rendering the nudity as anything but titillating.

It’s a startling artistic work: a film that looks and sounds like a mainstream Hollywood picture but that, at closer inspection, is anything but one.

Around the time “Contempt” was made, Godard was at a career crossroad: either he could become a mainstream filmmaker that could reap the financial spoils that came with it or he could continue down a road of making revolutionary and mostly small-budget films. He cut his losses, chose the latter and drifted farther and farther away from coherent cinema during the decades that followed. Though his later films may not have had the influence that his films of the early to mid-1960s had, his enduring vision and desire to revolt against the film establishment still reverberates to many filmmakers today.