Brigitte Bardot / Le Mépris

 

Brigitte Bardot
LE MÉPRIS

 

Breathless goodbye: the race to finish Jean-Luc Godard’s last film, one day before he died

The cinematic legend died the way he lived – in a blaze of inscrutable, impossible film-making. We meet the team who helped shoot the final scene of his swansong just before his death by assisted suicide

Xan Brooks

Monday 20 May 2024

In Friday 9 September 2022, Jean-Luc Godard had one last wish. He needed a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre to complete his film, Scénarios, but the book was missing from the shelf in his Swiss home. Time was pressing: he was up against a hard deadline. The film’s final scene was to be shot on Monday. On Tuesday, the director would die by assisted suicide.

Casa Malaparte
Capri, Italy

 

ARCHITECTURE

SAINT LAURENT AT CASA MALAPARTE

Posted on by Annalisa Guerisoli

The Casa Malaparte in Capri has been chosen as the location for the new 2018 Spring/Summer Saint Laurent campaign starring the beautiful Kate Moss. The video was directed by Nathalie Canguilhem who places the top model on the villa’s iconic staircase, an architectural walkway that seems to lead directly to the sky.

Casa Malaparte and its particular thirty-three step staircase are an icon of rationalist Italian architecture. Created between 1938 and 1943 by Adalberto Libera, but showing signs of the influential relationship between the writer Curzio Malaparte and the builder Adolfo Amitrano, it stands on the almost inaccessible promontory of Punta Masullo, one of the most fascinating and mysterious places in Capri.

“Serge Let Me Be His Female Side” / Jane Birkin on Gainsbourg, Varda, Truffaut, and Her Iconic Career

Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg

“Serge Let Me Be His Female Side”: Jane Birkin on Gainsbourg, Varda, Truffaut, and Her Iconic Career

Film | By Alison Nastasi | February 1, 2016

English actress and singer Jane Birkin beautifully shifts between breathy French and British accents. She speaks of her time with former partner Serge Gainsbourg, one of France’s most brilliant artists, with great fondness. It was a romance that unfolded in the public eye after they worked together on the 1969 film Slogan. The couple would go on to record the controversial, erotic duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus.”

Jane’s career in music and film would continue to blossom, as she worked with French cinema greats including Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, and Birkin’s third partner, Jacques Doillon. Daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg follows in her mother’s footsteps as an actress driven to complicated roles — and both women are now the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center. Jane and Charlotte Forever runs through February 7.

Le Mépris review – Jean-Luc Godard versus marriage and the film industry

Brigitte Bardot reminds us what all the fuss was about, alongside Jack Palance and Michel Piccoli, in this restored version of Godard’s 1963 classic


Jonathan Romney
Sunday 3 January 2016 08.00 GMT


Ifirst saw Le Mépris many years ago in a print so faded that everything was pale pink; it felt like gazing at an artefact from an immeasurably distant past. Watching the film now, with its reds and Mediterranean blues restored to their full intensity, the film is still redolent of a lost antiquity, not least because Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 feature is so steeped in melancholy and a sense of mourning.

Ostensibly adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel Contempt, the film stars Michel Piccoli as writer Paul, selling his soul to work for US producer Prokosch, played by a magnificently overbearing Jack Palance. This tycoon is a philistine so monstrous that he dares rage at no less a deity than the great Fritz Lang (playing himself), whom he’s hired to direct a movie of The Odyssey.

Brigitte Bardot, meanwhile, is Paul’s wife Camille, the Penelope to Paul’s modern-day Ulysses – but she’s also Bardot. The star’s explosive physical appeal is analysed in an opening nude scene that was at once Godard’s sop to his producers, and a self-reflexively overt exercise in sex-symbol objectification. It’s a Godard film, after all: BB, the film reminds us, stands for both Brigitte Bardot and Bertolt Brecht.

Le Mépris features some of the most imposing exteriors in 60s cinema, shot by Raoul Coutard around the extraordinary Villa Malaparte on Capri – not so much a house, more a landscape installation. The centrepiece of the BFI Southbank’s new Godard season, Le Mépris is arguably the director’s only film that could bring tears to your eyes – not least because of Georges Delerue’s sublime score. It’s also a peerless source of style tips – watch Piccoli and learn how to wear your trilby “comme Dean Martin”.

 Watch the trailer for Le Mépris.

THE GUARDIAN

BIOGRAFPHY OF ALBERTO MORAVIA