LE MÉPRIS (105’)
by Jean-Luc Godard
cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Georgia Moll, Fritz Lang, Jean-Luc Godard
France/Italy, 1963
Restoration curated by Studiocanal
Introduced by Carmelo Marabello
“This is not a Moravian transposition of the novel about conjugal contempt written by Moravia. It is a cruel film about cinema bodies. The first is Brigitte Bardot’s. As J.J. Bory wrote, it is the ‘song of the Woman-woman, the anti-Beauvoir, the small scowling sphinx with glowing flesh” – and of sublime, hard inertia in the face of the scriptwriter husband Piccoli’s vile cowardice. Whereas Fritz Lang is the body of a Godardian filiation. Lang in the film is Lang the director of M and Rancho Notorius, but he is also Lang as the myth of the filmmaker, the gaze of cinema that observes and judges, he is the conscience of the film. Which, alluding to his relationship with the producer Jack Palance, even quotes Brecht’s Hollywood about having to go to the market every day to sell one’s own lies.” (Gianni Volpi)
“It was butchered in the Italian edition by the producer Carlo Ponti who cut 19 minutes and replaced Georges Delerue’s beautiful music with music by Piero Piccioni. In the original, Bardot and Piccoli speak French, and Palance speaks English, in the Italian version they are all dubbed and speak to one another with the help of the interpreter G. Moll, who repeats the lines that have already been spoken to exhilarating effect.” (Morando Morandini)
