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Rating: "So do you love me completely?
Completely, tenderly, and tragically."
The film, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, tells the story of the relationship between Paul (the great Michel Piccoli), an Italian screenwriter, and his wife Camille (the charming Brigitte Bardot), and how in a love relationship, the edge of contempt can creep in, a loss of esteem that leads straight to indifference. The beauty of this film is precisely the sadness that overtakes us when a splendid relationship cracks and begins to slip into distances, silences, and the unspoken. The splendid music of the film and the beautiful images shot on the Mediterranean make this breakup even more chilling and painful, these bright and beautiful spaces do not help clarify or talk, but increase the distances and mute gazes.
Why the contempt? Contempt arises because Paul seems to accept the persistent advances that the detestable American producer of the next film (the one that should give him work) makes towards his beautiful wife. Paul is a man in crisis, at a crossroads between accepting the job to ensure a better home for himself and his wife and therefore tolerating the courtship, or dropping everything and punching that greasy man. This uncertainty, this hesitation, leads his wife to lose esteem in him, to indeed despise him.
The film being shot is the Odyssey; will Paul be able to be a new Ulysses and find his way home, the pure relationship, and the essence of the relationship with his Penelope? This is an association the director proposes and that I find too simplistic, too predictable. It has been just 3 years since "A bout de souffle," and Godard, while maintaining his usual original and new style, seems to have lost a bit of spontaneity, of freshness.
Through the interplay between the film's director, Fritz Lang himself, and the American producer who wants a more commercial Odyssey, between the crisis between Paul and Camille, Godard also intended to make a discourse on cinema in general (in fact, occasionally suggesting this by showing us sentences) on the crisis of cinema, the conflict between art and commerce. I find that this discourse also remains underdeveloped, what remains of this film are the stunning initial images of the two lovers enclosed in the shadow of their love, the use of color that is not naturalistic but forced (the long scene at home between the two and the use of red), and that lump in the throat that remains seeing the suffering of a loss, of a distancing that makes us think of how fragile even the deepest relationships can be.
N.B. The film to watch is the one in French with Italian subtitles! The Italian version is scandalous: about 20 minutes were cut, the music and colors were altered, and even the ending was changed so much that Godard himself no longer recognized it as his film.
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