It was about 100 pages into Alberto Moravia’s Contempt, the book that Jean-Luc Godard’s famed film is based on, that I realized it could’ve been a novella. It’s little more than a single screw being twisted, to the point where you can’t tell if it’s getting tighter or just spinning its grooves in the stripped wood. Most of the details in the book are superfluous, half-hearted gestures at texture which serve to give context to the psychological and philosophical ponderings of the book’s protagonist, the screenwriter Riccardo Molteni, who’s writing a screenplay from The Odyssey, while his life is falling out of love with him. The small things that drive Emilia away build and build, but for Molteni they’re with an elusive foundation. He can’t figure why she no longer loves him, but she does.
The one-notedness of Moravia’s exercise in the novel, and its lack of useful detail, is precisely what makes it such good material for Godard to adapt. Immediately dispatched is the repetitiveness of Molteni for starkly different scenes in their visual construction—whether a Cinecittà lot outside a screening room, the wealthy American producer’s overgrown garden, the married couple’s half-finished apartment, a strange stage show with bad audio, or, most iconically, the Casa Malaparte in Capri. With Raoul Cotard’s widescreen cinematography paired with the wailing strings of Georges Deleure’s score, Contempt takes on a much more conventionally melodramatic affect compared to Moravia’s novel. That’s not to say that Godard’s film resists a slow burn; the most extraordinarily-directed sequence in his early career comes as Paul (Michel Piccoli) and Camille (Bridgitte Bardot) get into a prolonged and passive-aggressive argument in their home.
Despite the dramatics that dominate the film, it doesn’t start there. Instead, Godard begins by having a conversation about cinema itself, wherein he quotes that, “The cinema substitutes our gaze with a world more in harmony with our desires.” It’s ironic, because he misattributes Michel Mourlet’s quote to André Bazin, which itself is performing that shaping of the world into one's desires, while also presenting a world that’s anything but desirable. Instead, the world of Contempt is one of loss of control, wherein Paul can no longer understand or dominate his wife, and where the camera itself is distant enough to fail to understand her beyond what one can glean from a distance. But no matter what’s happening to the characters in frame, the director, just out of it, does remain in control.
In one of the greatest statements of how cinema works, Godard briefly, symbolically, eschews control of the camera to Fritz Lang (another brilliant change from the book, where they merely have someone who is “not quite” Lang directing the film within the novel). After they look over some rushes, Lang exits the screening room, and when he begins walking forward, the camera dollies back with him, before cutting to a reverse shot to see Paul and Camille running to each other, only to be intersected by the American producer Prokosch (Jack Palance), who’s so eager to get in the middle of their marriage. In this moment, where the director becomes the body of the camera and his eye becomes its gaze, the film begins its melodrama, as if the conceptual world of cinema had to be established before Godard could go in and experience its emotionality in earnest.
That initial distance makes all the quick stabs sting more and bleed longer, when suddenly the music swells and we’re flashed with images of Paul and Camille together—first in the past, and then later again in an imagined present and a near future—the film’s montage liberating the film from what can just be in front of it while saddling it with the emotional burden of the characters whose psychic distress is so great that it breaks across the distance to the camera, through the screen, and into the solar plexus. Here cinema in all of its advancement, all its growth, all the 70-some years since L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, the artform returns to its visceral roots.