Contempt

"Totalement, tendrement, tragiquement," not yet fin de cinéma but fin de mariage, just as bleak. Art is all Greek to businessmen, thus the French writer (Michel Piccoli) in Cinecittà assigned to an adaptation of The Odyssey with an elderly Teutonic master at the helm. The truculent American moneybags (Jack Palance) perks up at the sight of nude mermaids in the screening room, the director is Fritz Lang himself, who's dealt with his share of sharks in his lifetime. The writer's wife (Brigitte Bardot) loves him until she doesn't, when did it happen? "The individual against the circumstances" in ancient and modern worlds, Jean-Luc Godard's astringent flirtation with big-studio budget. Spoken credits, Technicolor and 'Scope, a camera turned onto itself. The couple's disintegration is a virtuosic set-piece in an unfinished apartment, a whirl of bickering and wigs and bathtubs through doorways within doorways caught in lateral pans curiously evocative of Hitchcock's in Rope. "Is that a tender smile, or a mocking smile?" Painted eyes on Rossellini's statuary (Viaggio in Italia), obligatory cheesecake chilled by colored filters. Language and image, interpreters are necessary and abused figures in Lumière's "invention without a future." The husband once penned crime novels and now finds himself as both whore and pimp, in his own mind he's Dean Martin in Some Came Running. The wife is a specific woman and the Bardot icon, blonde mane and dark shades against Mediterranean blues, a wounded bombshell. Palance because it's The Big Knife and Giorgia Moll from The Quiet American, the triste timbre is close to Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town. "Use your own ideas instead of stealing them from everyone else." A couple of commentators throughout, Lang's wry serenity in the face of venal commercialism and Georges Delerue's aching requiem for romance dissipated. It builds to a red Alfa Romeo mangled at the intersection, and a panning view of the oceanic horizon with no Ithaca in sight. "Silenzio!" Cinematography by Raoul Coutard.