Love and Its Antagonism: Godard’s Mise-En-Scene of Marital Strife
Love and its antagonism: Godard’s mise-en-scene of marital strife
Le Mépris (Contempt) is about love at its last fraying ends. About hidden desires beseeching to be fulfilled. About the plight of Greek gods. About the travails and tough love of filmmaking. Godard’s film illustrates the story of a screenwriter’s marriage and its ineluctable deterioration. Rich of human relations and its poignant subtexts, my thesis is to demystify the enigma of Godard’s mise-en-scene on the subject of love and marital woes, and how to an effect has Le Mépris moves us transcendentally.
Here in the second scene, we are graced with the presence of the lovers – screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) and his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot). Basking in the after-glow of lovemaking, Camille, in a dulcet voice, whispers lewd sweet nothings… detailing whether her husband loves her, in the totality of her luscious feminine body parts – ankles, knees, derriere, breasts, and so on. As Camille delves vulnerably into this intimacy, her every question begs a plea for consummate love. And that, to her disappointment, is well beyond the ken of her husband.
Though Paul readily answers her love pleas with superlatives, the mere big words do not transcend Camille’s idea of consummate love. To Paul, Camille is his trophy wife – pretty and sexy… submissive and guileless. Her desires and thoughts are seen as insignificant. After all, he is the sole breadwinner, beleaguered by the inner nag to pay off their upscale flat. Thus here we begin to understand the interplay of the lovers’ hidden and very isolated desires. The void of complementary passion. The roots of love’s antagonism. The resistance of love’s pardon.
This scene hints how the film would circumstantially unravel. With the use of colour filters, at first dismissed simply as aesthetic spontaneity. Red, blue and yellow are now seen as a symbolic attribution to subjective meaning. The colour coding is entrenched in the film, shown
Le Mépris (Contempt) is about love at its last fraying ends. About hidden desires beseeching to be fulfilled. About the plight of Greek gods. About the travails and tough love of filmmaking. Godard’s film illustrates the story of a screenwriter’s marriage and its ineluctable deterioration. Rich of human relations and its poignant subtexts, my thesis is to demystify the enigma of Godard’s mise-en-scene on the subject of love and marital woes, and how to an effect has Le Mépris moves us transcendentally.
Here in the second scene, we are graced with the presence of the lovers – screenwriter Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) and his beautiful wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot). Basking in the after-glow of lovemaking, Camille, in a dulcet voice, whispers lewd sweet nothings… detailing whether her husband loves her, in the totality of her luscious feminine body parts – ankles, knees, derriere, breasts, and so on. As Camille delves vulnerably into this intimacy, her every question begs a plea for consummate love. And that, to her disappointment, is well beyond the ken of her husband.
Though Paul readily answers her love pleas with superlatives, the mere big words do not transcend Camille’s idea of consummate love. To Paul, Camille is his trophy wife – pretty and sexy… submissive and guileless. Her desires and thoughts are seen as insignificant. After all, he is the sole breadwinner, beleaguered by the inner nag to pay off their upscale flat. Thus here we begin to understand the interplay of the lovers’ hidden and very isolated desires. The void of complementary passion. The roots of love’s antagonism. The resistance of love’s pardon.
This scene hints how the film would circumstantially unravel. With the use of colour filters, at first dismissed simply as aesthetic spontaneity. Red, blue and yellow are now seen as a symbolic attribution to subjective meaning. The colour coding is entrenched in the film, shown