Part of the Picture: Scene from a Marriage

SCENE FROM A MARRIAGE

JAN 31, 2009 – TWO SETS OF CONFLICTS FORM THE BASIS of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt – between art and commerce, and between man and woman. The former erupts when a crass American producer (Jeremy Prokosch, played by Jack Palance) professes unhappiness over the artistic choices of the director (Fritz Lang, played by the master himself) he has hired to make a film on The Odyssey. The producer delights at the sight of naked mermaids frolicking in the Mediterranean, while the director prefers to route his visuals through dilapidated statues of stone-cold Greek gods. But it’s the latter conflict that really interests Godard – the titular emotion that Camille (Brigitte Bardot) begins to feel towards her husband (Paul, played Michel Piccoli) over an apparent non-issue.

Paul has been hired to rewrite the screenplay according to Prokosch’s vulgar vision – and for this selling of his soul, he will be amply rewarded with riches that will allow him to buy, for himself and for Camille, the apartment of their dreams. However, when Paul encourages Camille to leave with Prokosch in the latter’s two-seater car, en route to the producer’s villa, she frets that her husband may have sold a little too much of his soul, perhaps encouraging his employer’s designs on her. But long before this apparent non-issue develops into a conflict that threatens to detonate their marriage, we see Paul and Camille in happier times, in one of the most famous sequences of the sixties’ art cinema.

The narrator has just finished filling us in with the film’s titles – orally, that is, over the fourth-wall-breaking image of the cinematographer (the great Raoul Coutard) executing a tracking shot – and he concludes: “The cinema,” says André Bazin, “substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires. Contempt is a story of that world.” Coutard then trains the lens of his camera towards the audience, as if he were making us (and, by extension, “our desires”) the object of his gaze – and appropriately enough, the next scene features a naked Camille, face down beside Paul on their bed. Bathed in a harsh red filter, she swings her feet in the air and enquires, “See my feet in the mirror?”

“Oui,” he replies. She asks if they’re pretty. “Yes, very,” he says. She then asks if he likes her ankles. He replies, again, in the affirmative. And she goes on to enquire about her knees. By now, the incredibly romantic (and yet incredibly tragic) violins have begun to swirl and soar, investing his replies with infinitely more feeling than his monotone would suggest. “I really like your knees.” She moves on to ask about her thighs, her behind, her breasts. “Yes, tremendously,” he replies, and possibly aroused by all this fact-checking, he attempts to kiss her on the mouth. “Gently Paul, not so hard,” she protests. He apologises.

“Which do you like better, my breasts,” she asks, and lowering her voice to a whisper, she continues, “or my nipples?” He answers, “I don’t know. I like them the same.” And suddenly, the blinding red filter is turned off and the room is bathed in a more natural light, the kind you’d expect from a lamp by the bedside. Pointing at her shoulders, now, with a finger, she asks if he likes them. “Yes,” he says, but she persists, “I don’t think they’re round enough.” As the camera moves downwards, to her derriere – a part about whose delectable roundness there can be no doubt – and to her legs beyond, she asks, “And my arms? And my face?”

And now, the natural lighting gives way to the harsh effects of a blue filter, as he replies, “Your face, too.” She continues, “All of it? My mouth, my eyes, my nose, my ears?” He replies, “Yes, everything.” She concludes, “Then you love me totally.” Bending down to kiss her, he replies, in one of the most exquisitely alliterative declamations of movie love, “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.” She turns away and replies, “Me too, Paul.” As she looks up again at him, he cups her face in his hands, as if about to draw her closer – for possibly a kiss, possibly more – when Godard cuts away cruelly to Paul walking down Cinecittà studios and hailing his employer’s secretary.

The reason behind the cruelty of this cut, this refusal to take the foreplay of this sensual scene to its logically orgasmic climax, appears to be the simple fact that Godard is done with what he was compelled to do, and he’s moved on to that portion of the story where his interest really lies. Movie legend has it that the producers were appalled that, after hiring Bardot, there wasn’t a single instance of nudity, and when pressured, the director complied (with a fair degree of contempt, one might add, mirroring the conflict of art and commerce within the film) with this scene where he practically screams, “You want to see her nude body? I’ll show you her nude body! In fact, I’ll do one better by referencing every goddamn part of her nude body!”

But seen as a part of the whole picture, today, it’s impossible to imagine Contempt without this apparently gratuitous scene – for with its casual carnality, it gives us, in one deft stroke, a “before” snapshot of this marriage, an idealised image to hold on to as Paul and Camille grow increasingly distant. Godard surely wouldn’t have intended so sentimental a reading of a scene he inserted into his film with a gun pointed to his head, but the magic of the cinema is that it is oftentimes more than even what its creator wants it to be. Even Godard cannot prevent his contemptuous compliance with his producer’s orders from shaping into a powerfully intimate vision of a togetherness that will drift irrevocably apart.

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Posted in: Cinema: Foreign