Film Talk - French Cinema: A Beautiful Friendship (15)

At the end of Casablanca, Rick and Captain Louis Renault walk off together into the fog. ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful
friendship,’ says Rick in one of the cinema’s most famous last lines. In his talk, Charles Drazin, author of The Faber Book of French Cinema,
explores the ‘beautiful friendship’ that existed between French cinema and Hollywood during the post-war years, considering all those intense, contradictory emotions that so often exist in close relationships, whether love, hate or contempt. To illustrate, there will be a complete screening of Jean Luc in the frame Godard’s 1963 classic Le Mépris (Contempt), starring Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance.

Contempt 15
Le Mepris
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
France 1963 103mins subtitled
Cast: Brigitte Bardot,
Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance
Benoît Magimel

Jean-Luc Godard’s subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. Contempt (Le Mépris) stars
Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), a crude and arrogant American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Bardot), as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey.