Le Mépris is 60 years old: 5 things to know about the cult film by Jean-Luc Godard

It is now viewable in 4K.

Last May, Jean-Luc Godard was honored as part of the Cannes festival, notably through the first broadcast of his classic, Contempt, re-released in 4K. Since then, this new version of this shocking film carried by Brigitte Bardot And Michael Piccoli was released on DVD and Blu-ray.

We share a handful of anecdotes about its making, on the occasion of its sixtieth anniversary: Contempt was released in theaters on December 20, 1963. At the time, it was prohibited for minors because of its nudity scenes, but that did not prevent it from doing well, reaching 1.5 million admissions over the duration.

Cinema and love

Contempt is probably the best known film of Jean-Luc Godard with Breathless And Pierrot le fou. At the beginning of the 1960s, the filmmaker dreamed of a major project. Alberto Moravia’s novel, It disappears, published in 1955 in France, attracted his attention. He talks about cinema and love. The story features a screenwriter and his young wife seeming united, but an incident with a producer will lead the wife to despise her husband. What interests Godard is not so much filming cinema in the making as demystifying its world. Contempt it is also the entomological dissection of the end of a couple between arguments and bad looks. A situation that the director knows well, whose marriage to Anna Karina is dissolving.

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Kim Novak, Sophia Loren or BB

Godard is not the only one to love Contempt. The great Italian producer, Carlo Ponti, is also interested in it. He bought the rights, with the aim of giving the main roles to Sophia Loren, his wife in the city, and Marcello Mastroianni. Finally, in April 1962, we learn in the excellent biography of Godard by Antoine de Baecque, three producers agreed to produce the film: the Frenchman Georges de Beauregard, the Italian Carlo Ponti and the American Joe Levine . Jean-Luc Godard will direct. Levine dreams of Kim Novak and Frank Sinatra. Georges de Beauregard and Godard respond with Brigitte Bardot, the sex symbol of the early 1960s, and get everyone to agree.

A making-of larger than life

On the island of Capri, Brigitte Bardot is awaited by a crowd of paparazzi, these celebrity photographers immortalized three years earlier by Frederico Fellini in The good life. On the set, Jacques Rozier, director of the New Wave, also decided to direct in his own words, “the birth of the celebrity moment”. His documentary, titled Paparazzilasting 17 minutes and 50 minutes, shows the dismay of the most photographed woman in the world.

Villa Malaparte

Red block erected facing the sea, the villa of the Contempt has become the emblem of the film, just as much as BB’s curves. However, filming only lasted six days. It is Charles Bitsch, the assistant director, who spots the house with its geometric shapes and its staircase carved out of the rock. It belongs to the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte who had it built in the 1930s, tailor-made for the cliff he had just acquired at the tip of the island. Finally, she belonged. Malaparte before dying in 1957 bequeathed his house to the Republic of China. The family contests the will making the place inaccessible before a court decision. It will take all the art of production negotiation to lift the ban for a few days.

Final standoff

Once the film is finished, Godard wants to present it at the Venice festival; but Carlo Ponti and Joe Levine did not like the film and asked Godard to re-edit it. By provocation, the filmmaker renders a totally disordered and unpresentable version. Angry producers grab the negative and threaten to make their own edit. Godard replies that he only asks that his name be removed from the credits. Only in France will the version be the one desired by the director.

The conflict escalates further when “Mussolini Ponti” And “King Kong Levi” such as Godard calls them, Godard is suing. Finally the filmmaker gives in and agrees to shoot new scenes where Brigitte Bardot will be shown in a sexier way (read naked!). In fact, he only filmed one, in the Boulogne Billancourt studios, where the heroine lying on her stomach questions her husband: “Do you like my knees? » This will become the most famous shot in the film!

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