A Conversation about "Contempt," Part I

For the next several days--or until they want to kill each other, whichever comes first--perennial odd couple Evan Davis and Madelyn Sutton will hash it out about one of Jean-Luc Godard's most celebrated early works. Check back regularly for updates.

Contempt is currently playing at Film Forum in downtown Manhattan until Tuesday, April 8th. The film is also available on an excellent DVD from the Criterion Collection.





Madelyn,

I don't know if you've had a chance to re-watch Contempt yet, but I suppose that since this whole scheme was my idea, I'll be the first to jump in. Let me also note that I plan to read the source novel by Alberto Moravia before this correspondence is over.

Having seen Contempt again last week (and for the first time on the big screen), I am still awestruck by the power the movie has on me. Never again did Jean-Luc Godard have a similar kind of power in one of his films, even in the ones I have held more dearly to my heart. Set amidst the master's 15-film winning streak in the 1960s, Contempt lacks the puckish anarchy of Pierrot le Fou, the apocalyptic majesty of La Chinoise and Weekend, the gleeful abandon of Breathless, A Woman is a Woman, Band of Outsiders and Masculin Feminin, and the academic depth of Les Carabiniers, Alphaville and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her-- but it has to be, alongside Vivre sa Vie, Godard's most emotionally satisfying work. And perhaps why that is has something to do with the subject he is honoring and deconstructing: the art film.

The topics of art vs. commerce, tradition vs. modernity, man vs. nature: these were subjects taken on by the great art filmmakers of the day. At least, they were so-called because the industry decided that a certain type of world cinema had to be codified as a genre. Antonioni, Bergman, and to a certain extent Resnais all dealt with this type of modern, ambiguous cinema, and Godard set out to probe just how they may have all connected into such a genre as the "art film." Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is the frustrated screenwriter who sells his soul to a boorish American producer, Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) in order to make some quick money for he and his young wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot). But in the process, a series of misunderstandings leads Camille to loathe Paul for his avarice, his potential infidelity, and his insouciance toward Prokosch's advances toward her. All the while, Fritz Lang, who is directing the adaptation of The Odyssey being written by Paul, stands at an observational distance, a relic from a past Contempt craves to reclaim, but cannot.

The distance between not only Paul and Camille but between Paul and everybody else is emphasized by the language barrier established from the humorous concept of the "international production." One of the most tender scenes involves Lang and Francesca (Giorgia Moll), Prokosch's assistant. They are the only two who speak all involved languages (French, English, Italian, German), and they seem to hold a deep warmth for each other because of this. Such tenderness doesn't exist between any two characters in the film, even Paul and Camille.

Famously, the prologue of a nude Camille and Paul lying in bed was forced on Godard by the film's producers, Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti and Joseph Levine. They thought that there wasn't enough "skin" of Bardot on screen, which would naturally be the main selling point, right? What Godard does in that moment is not only expose the audience's voyeurism, but also problematizes Bardot's own image of herself. The persistent questioning of Paul about whether or not he loves her various body parts illuminates Camille's deep insecurity about herself, and gives us a prophetic image of why Paul and Camille's marriage is fragile long before Paul becomes involved with Prokosch.

As emotionally involved as we become with Paul and Camille, Godard deliberately forces us to examine their tenderness and cruelty from a distance. He shoots long, distant takes that are never clean in their mise en scene. Most famously, in the extended break-up/make-up scene between Paul and Camille, pillars, doors, and even lampshades prevent the two characters from joining in proper unity. Indeed, the apartment itself becomes a war zone.

Flash cuts remind us of the past and predict the future. Georges Delerue's brilliant score comes and goes seemingly at random. During a vaudeville show, the music stops so the characters can converse uninterrupted. And what Lang is seemingly making is a delicious parody of a traditional misconception of the "art film," when in fact, in the form of Contempt, the audience is witnessing one of its greatest incarnations. Godard is constantly distancing us from natural emotion, which in its own perverse way makes us feel even stronger the emotional catastrophe that Paul and Camille are inflicting on each other. In the late 1950s/early 1960s heyday of the "art film," Godard made the weirdest and most beautiful of them all.


This is all perhaps a bit vague in its effusiveness, but I think that depth will be achieved once the sparring begins. I look forward to your rebuttal.

-Evan

Gus Van Sant's Newest Masterpiece

Paranoid Park opens this Friday at the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, and opens wide in two weeks.



Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, 2007)

I'm writing this a little out of order. Sorry. I didn't do so well in creative writing . . .


No one would ever accuse Alex Tremaine (Gabe Nevins) of being anything but normal. He is 15, lives in Portland, OR, goes to high school, has divorced parents, has a girlfriend, and loves to skateboard. But there is something else to Alex, something more mysterious and perhaps more profound. Of course, he doesn’t really know it yet.

Paranoid Park is a film that brings every confused and terrifying element of Alex’s psyche to a boiling surface. Writer/editor/director Gus Van Sant has sculpted a film that is an embodiment of subjectivity, every element some evocation of emotional consciousness. And it takes a most brutal event to make Alex even slightly aware that there is something going on inside of him.

The event in question is a death that Alex causes, but is difficult to classify as murder. The police certainly do, but within the diegesis of the film, they never discover the truth. Alex can barely comprehend what has occurred, but it creates a deep rupture that closes him off from his former life.

Van Sant, taking his cue from the source novel by Blake Nelson, frames the movie as a letter Alex is writing to his friend Macy (Lauren McKinney), but unlike Nelson’s protagonist, Van Sant’s Alex tells it out of order. Accordingly, Van Sant fragments chronology in a dense and effortless way. Alex is so consumed by the bewildering viscerality of his emotions that he is unable to cohere his experience properly. Alex is a stream of consciousness, but the film then becomes the complete embodiment of that stream, giving form and grace to Alex’s confusion.

How does Van Sant accomplish this? First and foremost, credit must be given to DP’s Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li. It is a rather canny move on Van Sant’s part to use Doyle in place of his standby for the “Death Trilogy,” Harris Savides. Whereas Savides’s images are dense and heavy, Doyle’s are light and lyrical. He is looser and more delicate. (See his work with Wong Kar Wai for further proof.) Slow motion, eerie lighting, and the texture of faces are all a part of Doyle and Van Sant’s arsenal, emphasizing a tension between Alex’s exterior monotone and the swirl of interior psychic trauma.

As much as Paranoid Park’s visual conception brings forth a vision of Alex’s psychological deterioration, so the sound design further ruptures his subconscious. The songs, which are certainly not part of Alex’s universe (from Elliott Smith to Beethoven to Nino Rota), marry themselves to Doyle and Li’s images in a startlingly bracing way. From the slow-motion shower scene set to a piercing sound tone, to the silent breakup between Alex and Jennifer (Taylor Momsen) set to a theme from Juliet of the Spirits, sound is wholly integral to the lyrical tapestry, and may signal a push forward in American sound design when considered alongside No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood.

And then there is the subject of skateboarding itself. As mentioned by a friend who himself is a skateboarder (and who will, hopefully, eventually post a response to this review), the movie doesn’t appear to contain much fidelity toward the question of why teenagers skateboard in the first place. (There is also the semantic issue of misnaming Portland’s Burnside Skateboard Park as Paranoid Park, when in fact there actually is a Paranoid Park located in downtown Portland.) The movie’s launch point is skateboarding, but it is not its destination. What Alex finds in skateboarding is a liberating, alluring, and dangerous escape from the trials of his quotidian existence (divorce, homework, girlfriends). Especially if we accept the notion that the film’s aesthetic achievements serve as a subconscious counterpoint to what Alex is actually conscious of, then we can argue that skateboarding is not what he believes it to be. And certainly his fantasies of kids doing high-level tricks–gorgeously filmed in Super-8 by Li, which serve as their own counterpoint to Doyle’s more immediately psychological images–are delightful dreams of his own aspirations, aspirations he may never actually achieve. Similarly, his description of those who frequent Paranoid Park (“train hoppers, guitar punks, throwaway kids . . .”) is a highly subjective reading of those he finds there, and may not necessarily be reality. The film seeks to uncover the rift in Alex’s consciousness that his “murder” creates. And since his association with one of Paranoid Park’s regulars leads to this rift, we can potentially see his view of skateboarding as a trap rather than a liberation.

Akiva Gottlieb at Slant mentions that at the end of the film, “we empathize with an ‘unrepentant murderer.’” Granted, he puts the key phrase in quotes, but it is worth mulling over. By film’s end, it has been revealed to us who exactly Alex is writing his letter to, and what he does with it. In one of the film’s most haunting images, we watch Alex in slow-motion throw one page after another into a fire while “Angeles” by Elliott Smith plays on the soundtrack. His soul has finally been unburdened. But does this mean that Alex has not repented? Does it even mean that he “got away with it?” Thanks to Van Sant’s fragmented chronology, we cannot be certain as to what may have happened after Alex disposes of the letter. It is unclear when his conversation with the detective–in which it is revealed that Alex’s skateboard has been found with the security guard’s DNA on it–occurs in relation to the letter’s burning. One can presume that the police might find further evidence on that skateboard that links Alex directly to the murder. And the final sequence finds Alex dreaming Li’s skateboarding fantasias, which he finally appears in. Have his fantasies consumed him to the point where he is a part of them, or are they delivering their farewell, never to return? It is unclear, and for Alex, the only thing that matters is that he is now able to honestly grapple with what he earlier called “different levels of stuff.” In other words, he has passed from innocence to experience. And perhaps he will begin to understand what those different levels actually mean.