Tag Archives: Brigitte Bardot

BRIGITTE BARDOT, FEMME FATALE: CONTEMPT

Brigitte Bardot shows off both her acting talent and beautiful body in Jean-Luc Godard’s CONTEMPT

CinémaTuesdays: CONTEMPT (LE MEPRIS) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 11, $10, 12:30 & 4:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

French auteur Jean-Luc Godard doesn’t hold back any of his contempt for Hollywood cinema in his multilayered masterpiece Contempt. Loosely based on Alberto Moravia’s Il Disprezzo, Contempt stars Michel Piccoli as Paul Javal, a French screenwriter called to Rome’s famed Cinecittà studios by American producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance ) to perform rewrites on Austrian director Fritz Lang’s (played by Lang himself) adaptation of The Odyssey by ancient Greek writer Homer. Paul brings along his young wife, the beautiful Camille (Brigitte Bardot), whom Prokosch takes an immediate liking to. With so many languages being spoken, Prokosch’s assistant, Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll), serves as translator, but getting the various characters to communicate with one another and say precisely what is on their mind grows more and more difficult as the story continues and Camille and Paul’s love starts to crumble. Contempt is a spectacularly made film, bathed in deep red, white, and blue, as Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard poke fun at the American way of life. (Both Godard and Coutard appear in the film, the former as Lang’s assistant director, the latter as Lang’s cameraman — as well as the cameraman who aims the lens right at the viewer at the start of the film.)

Producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) doesn’t always have the kindest of words for director Fritz Lang in CONTEMPT

Bardot is sensational in one of her best roles, whether teasing Paul at a marvelously filmed sequence in their Rome apartment (watch for him opening and stepping through a door without any glass), lying naked on the bed, asking Paul what he thinks of various parts of her body (while Coutard changes the filter from a lurid red to a lush blue), or pouting when it appears that Paul is willing to pimp her out in order to get the writing job. Palance is a hoot as the big-time producer, regularly reading fortune-cookie-like quotes from an extremely little red book he carries around that couldn’t possibly hold so many words. And Lang, who left Germany in the mid-1930s for a career in Hollywood, has a ball playing a version of himself, an experienced veteran willing to put up with Prokosch’s crazy demands. Vastly entertaining from start to finish, Contempt is filled with a slew of inside jokes about the filmmaking industry and even Godard’s personal and professional life, along with some of the French director’s expected assortment of political statements and a string of small flourishes that are easy to miss but add to the immense fun, all set to a gorgeous romantic score by Georges Delerue. Contempt is screening December 11 as part of FIAF’s December CinémaTuesdays series “Brigitte Bardot, Femme Fatale,” which also includes Roger Vadim’s . . . And God Created Woman on the same day and René Clair’s The Grand Maneuver on December 18.

BRIGITTE BARDOT, FEMME FATALE: MASCULIN FEMININ

Brigitte Bardot makes an unexpected cameo in MASCULIN FEMININ

CinémaTuesdays: MASCULIN FÉMININ (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
French Institute Alliance Française, Tinker Auditorium
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 4, $10, 7:00
212-355-6160
www.fiaf.org

In a 1966 interview with Pierre Daix about Masculin feminin, director Jean-Luc Godard said, “When I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I wanted.” Initially to be based on the Guy de Maupassant short stories “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” the film ended up being a revolutionary examination of the emerging youth culture in France, which Godard identifies as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Godard threw away the script and worked on the fly to make the film, which stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a peculiar young man who quickly becomes obsessed with budding pop star Madeleine, played by real-life Yé-yé singer Chantal Goya. (Godard discovered her on a television variety show.) Paul chases Madeleine, getting a job at the same company, going to the movies and nightclubs with her and her friends, and meeting her in cafés, where he wants to talk about the troubles of contemporary society and she just wants to have a good time. “Man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence. His social being determines his conscience,” Paul proclaims. He continually argues that there is nothing going on even as strange events occur around him to which he is completely oblivious, including a lover’s spat in which a woman guns down a man in broad daylight. (Sounds of rapid-fire bullets can be heard over the intertitles for each of the film’s fifteen faits précis, evoking a sense of impending doom.) Paul has bizarre conversations with his best friend, Robert (Michel Debord), a radical who asks him to help put up anarchist posters. Posing as a journalist, Paul brutally interviews Miss 19 (Elsa Leroy), a young model with a very different view of society and politics. Godard has also included a playful battle of the sexes in the center of it all: Paul wants Madeleine, much to the consternation of Madeleine’s roommate, Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), who also has designs on her; meanwhile, Robert goes out with another of Madeleine’s friends, the more grounded Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport), who is interested in Paul. It all makes for great fun, taking place in a surreal black-and-white world dominated by rampant consumerism. In addition, Godard comments on the state of cinema itself. As they watch a Bergman-esque Swedish erotic film (directed by Godard and starring Eva-Britt Strandberg and Birger Malmsten), Paul dashes off to the projectionist, arguing that the aspect ratio is wrong. And in a café scene, French starlet Brigitte Bardot and theater director Antoine Bourseiller sit in a booth, playing themselves as they go over a script, bringing together the real and the imaginary. “I no longer have any idea where I am from the point of view of cinema,” Godard told Daix. “I am in search of cinema. It seems to me that I have lost it.” Well, he apparently found it again with the seminal Masculin feminin, which kicks off FIAF’s December CinémaTuesdays series “Brigitte Bardot, Femme Fatale” and also includes Roger Vadim’s . . . And God Created Woman and Godard’s Contempt on December 11 and René Clair’s The Grand Maneuver on December 18.