Godard’s story of a screenwriter, his wife and an American producer in Rome is a handsome film and a cold one. Raoul Coutard’s colours and Georges Delerue’s strings do the feeling; the people are left to fall apart in a half-built flat.
Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) writes plays. An American producer, Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), is making The Odyssey at Cinecittà in Rome with Fritz Lang directing, and wants Paul to rewrite it. Paul takes the job to pay for the flat he and his wife Camille (Brigitte Bardot) are buying. Jean-Luc Godard, adapting Alberto Moravia’s novel, tells the rest in 103 minutes, and it is clear early that neither the film nor the marriage is going well. We recommend it, with a warning. It is a handsome film and a cold one, and the middle third asks for a patience it does not always repay.
The producers sold it on Bardot, and the poster promised “much, much more Bardot”. Godard gives them the scene. Camille lies naked on a bed and asks Paul whether he likes her feet, her knees, her shoulders, her face, and Paul says yes to each. Then Raoul Coutard drops a red filter over the shot, then a blue one, so the body the poster promised turns into a slab of colour. From there Coutard shoots Rome in hard sunlight and flat blocks of red, white and blue, and Tanine Autré puts Camille in a yellow dressing gown and, later, a black wig, so the colours carry more of the story than the lines do.
Palance plays Prokosch as a man who has never been contradicted. He bounds down the steps of an empty studio lot and needs Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll) to translate everything he says into French and everything he hears into English. Moll does the hardest job in the film without fuss; half her lines are other people’s, softened. Lang, playing himself, is the only person on screen at peace, watching his rushes with the calm of a man who knows the picture will be taken from him. Those rushes, plaster gods with painted eyes turning against the sky, are the loveliest things in the film.
Then the flat. Camille and Paul go home to rooms they cannot yet afford, half-plastered, with a bath, a lamp and a door that will not stay shut, and they argue for about half an hour. Coutard’s camera tracks left and right across the flat, following whoever is talking, and Godard barely cuts; Lila Lakshmanan and Agnès Guillemot leave this one alone. Camille puts the wig on and takes it off. Paul gets into the bath with his hat on. She says she does not love him any more and will not say why; he asks why a dozen times. Twenty minutes in we wanted it to end. It did not, and we realised we were feeling exactly what Paul was feeling, and had been put in his place on purpose. It is the scene most critics argue about, and it is the film.
What stops the thing freezing over is Georges Delerue. He writes one theme, strings, slow, rising and never quite settling, and Godard brings it back over the statues, the bed, the sea. It moved us more than a shot of a plaster Neptune has any right to. The music does the mourning nobody on screen can manage.
The flaws are real. Paul is weak and a little cruel, and Piccoli plays him truthfully, which means a hundred minutes with a man we would cross a street to avoid. Bardot is given almost nothing to say that explains Camille, and Godard shoots her as a face and a body as if daring us to notice, and the daring gets tiring. He also cannot resist the quotations, the sight of his own cameraman and himself at Lang’s side. Some critics say it has dated; we would not go that far, but it is a young man’s film about a marriage, and it knows less about women than about cinema.
The second half moves to Capri and a red house on a cliff, and we will say nothing about what happens there. Watch it in one sitting and let the argument run. Then read the tagline again. The men who paid for the film sold it the way Prokosch would have, and Godard had already told them what he thought of that.
