Troubling Femininity:

Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris

By: Denise Mok

2009

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 Truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions.

F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-moral Sense”.

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film, Contempt (Le Mépris), loosely based on Alberto

Moravia’s novella first published in 1954, is about the painful breakdown of a marriage.

The female half of the couple in the film, Camille (performed by Brigitte Bardot), slowly

and surely develops contempt for her writer husband, Paul (Michel Piccoli), as his

relentless and pathetic attempts to “regain his ground” with his wife only make him seem

ever more insecure and despicable in her eyes. There are many possible avenues to take

based on the multiple subtexts of the film, such as the film being a modernized version of

The Odyssey, or a film about the creative-destruction tensions in film production, or

culture versus commercialism in artistic production; but I will focus on the filmic

representation of the principal female character, Camille/Bardot, and how this character

subverts the Male Gaze in the film and defamiliarizes our expectations of how a sex

symbol such as Brigitte Bardot would act onscreen. The focus of this paper will be on

how the visual and aural presentation of Bardot’s character, Camille, both conforms to—

but ultimately subverts—the display of the female body objectified in film imagery,

situating my discussion on Laura Mulvey and Judith Butler’s theories as launching points

for analysis.

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 Brigitte Bardot—on and off-screen—is both a liberating and a disturbing feminine

image because she is hyper-feminized and at once, completely natural and comfortable in

her raw sexuality. She seems both earthy and natural, but also very much a stylized

representation of “Woman” with her big blond bouffant, heavily charcoal-lined eyes, and

signature sexy pout. This recalls Judith Butler’s comment that “gender is a kind of

persistent impersonation that passes as the real”(Butler in Norton 2489). In this way

Bardot’s public image is a kind of impersonation of the Ultra Feminine: a heightened

femininity of what perhaps the ideal femme fatale would be. Following her “infamous

performance” in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956), Bardot’s film persona

has revolved around the sex-kitten or coquette image (“She is the princess of pout, the

countess of come-hither. Brigitte Bardot exuded a carefree, naïve sexuality…” quoted

Time magazine at the time), and invariably portrayed heartless and fickle women who

destroy her lovers. Off-screen, Bardot has been lionized by the media and paparazzi for

her numerous real-life love affairs and as an icon of openly sexual sun-soaked glamour.

She even recorded a song with Serge Gainsbourg in the 1960s titled, “Je t’aime…moi non

plus,” which some commentators have likened to orgasmic outbursts and at the time

sparked considerable controversy. This background highlights her public image which

infiltrates how she is perceived on the screen, especially in her performance—against

type—here in Contempt. This corresponds with Laura Mulvey’s assertion that “[t]he

image of a star is, in the first instance, an indexical sign like any other photographic

image and an iconic sign like any other representational image; it is also an elaborate

icon, with an ambivalent existence both inside and outside fictional

performance”(Mulvey 161). Thus, Bardot’s real-life persona frequently intrudes on and

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 overlaps her screen persona, based on “information that might be circulating about…her

life. Out of this kind of fusion and confusion, gossip and scandal derive their fascination

and become attached to the star’s extra-diegetic iconography. Behind even the most

achieved performance, sometimes in an unexpected flash, this extra-diegetic presence

intrudes from outside the screen and off-screen, giving an unexpected vulnerability to a

star’s on-screen performance”(Mulvey 173). In Bardot’s case, I would argue that this

vulnerability is actually an added dimension of complexity to her performance and

reverses what the audience is used to from her. Her unique star “aura” complicates her

screen persona in interesting and transgressive ways.

Jean-Luc Godard, the French New Wave auteur director responsible for Contempt,

has framed the arc of the couple’s story in three parts, which I outline here: 1) In Love –

the couple lying in bed having an intimate conversation; 2) Breakdown of the Couple –

husband and wife in the apartment fighting and exhibiting domestic violence; and 3)

Permanent Fissure and Dissolution – wife leaves husband for good. The narrative

trajectory is classical. Part 3 is the point of no return: Paul, the object of Camille’s

contempt, cannot ever get her back.

Contempt adheres to Mulvey’s critique in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

(1975), but I would argue, only uses these scopophilic instincts in the film to subvert

these conventions. For instance, in the first scene, the couple is in the bedroom having a

postcoital tête-a-tête and Bardot’s naked backside is diagonally framed on the screen. The

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 red filter for the camera is used and the scene is diffused by a pink glow, followed by a

white filter, and then a blue one. These stylistic variations heighten our awareness of the

directorial effort (making the images less naturalistic) and correspond to the

red/white/blue of the French and American flags, thus highlighting this film as an

international co-production. Placing Bardot’s buttocks so prominently in the frame then

exposes her body to the viewer’s scrutiny (which can be pleasure-seeking and

voyeuristic), so that the viewer is placed in the position of “Peeping Tom” on the two

intimate lovers. As Mulvey suggests in her chapter, “The Possessive Spectator,” visual

pleasure is achieved through manipulation of erotic visual images; that is, appealing to

our scopophilic instinct, as “the body is displayed for the spectator’s visual pleasure

through the mediation of the camera”(Mulvey 162). The shot resembles a Playboy

centerfold in that Bardot’s body is spread out like a horizontal landscape and remains

quite static throughout the shot (i.e., her lips move to speak but her body remains largely

in the same position throughout the scene). However, the camera does traverse up and

down her body horizontally, just like the equivalent of a vertical “look over” of the Male

Gaze in film convention (recall John Garfield’s character giving Lana Turner’s character

the “once over” in The Postman Always Rings Twice). Thus, the camera movement

mimics the “active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of

omnipotence”(Norton 2187) and control to the viewer, assumed to be usually male—the

bearer of the look. Even in dialogue it is as if we had intruded on an intimate

conversation, because the scene starts in mid-conversation, as Camille says: “I don’t

know what I’ll do…I may lunch with Mama…” etc.etc., so the verisimilitude to

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 eavesdropping is established in this in medias res opening shot, further arousing the

viewer’s sense of participating in voyeuristic pleasure.

Furthermore, another level of voyeurism is established by the anonymity of the

characters in this first scene. Godard plays with the introductory shots which usually

establishes who the characters are, and “when a star’s name and image, always instantly

recognizable to the audience, are replaced by another name within the order of the

fiction”(Mulvey 175). Here the director delays revealing their (fictional) identities until

after this first bedroom scene. We are not yet introduced to the characters as Camille or

Paul Laval; all we know is that we are watching the images of Brigitte Bardot and Michel

Piccoli together in bed! Here the characters are not established yet—no names have been

given—this elevates the merging of the fictional characters with the stars themselves, so

that this additional voyeurism—i.e., we feel like we are actually “peeping in” on these

celebrities making love—is brought out. This plays to our desire for “sneaking up on”

unsuspecting lovers, which is a common trope in film. Additionally, this (mis)recognition

(e.g., momentary confusing of onscreen persons with real-life identities) and perhaps

identification with the film images, both serve to create a moment of scopophilic surprise

and then recognition again.

However, the voyeurism and scopophilia facilitated by the scene is undercut by

the neutralizing camerawork and the questions Camille asks Paul. Instead of showing all

parts of her body like a striptease, Camille teases the viewer through language. She asks

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 Paul if he likes each part of her body and itemizes the parts, moving from less sexualized

parts (e.g., feet, ankles) to progressively more erotic ones (e.g., thighs, breasts, eyes, lips,

etc.). Finally, she asks him: “You love me tenderly, tragically, totally…?” Paul takes her

lead: he repeats her phrase in exact wording in the affirmative. She is the one leading the

interrogation and “calling the shots”. This subversion through language—instead of

seeing her naked parts we hear them one by one named—that is, called into being in our

imaginations—not only establishes her agency (Camille drives the interrogation), but also

reverses our expectations of what a Sex Goddess is like. Instead of presenting the male

initiative on the female sex object here, Camille’s body remains largely unexposed, but

she uses the intellectual and the semiotic for seduction. Naming at once arouses and

desexualizes the body. This fragmentation in naming the parts (think of nursery rhyme

“this little piggy went to market, this little piggy went to school…”) is substituted for the

act itself (note the contrast: in the Hollywood convention of today, the lovers would be

rolling around in heated passion on the bed, with intense face-to-face close-up shots, or

the camera would find opportunity to reveal full frontal nudity).

This subverting of viewer expectation is reiterated in other qualities of Camille’s

characterization. In the later apartment sequence, there arrives a moment when Camille is

liberating herself linguistically by verbalizing a catalogue of obscenities and blasphemies

to Paul, in response to his demeaning comment that “such language doesn’t suit you”.

She rebels by mouthing off every swear word she can think of. Camille’s body is de-

objectified, and instead her intellect is brought to the fore. She speaks here in an extreme

close-up shot of only her head and her expressionless face mouthing off the obscenities.

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 In the Freudian terms Mulvey borrows, her lacking is not negative, but instead is a

gain/strength against the flawed masculinity and phallic order in the film, represented by

the constellation of men around her such as her insecure husband, Paul (Michel Piccoli),

the arrogant producer-dictator Prokosch (played by Jack Palance), and the benign

director, Fritz Lang (playing himself). In the film, Camille even dresses as a rebel figure

against Bardot’s usual film image. For instance, early on Camille wears a conservative

navy blue skirt and sweater set, which goes against expectation. She is later seen wearing

a red long towel (recall James Dean’s symbolic red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause) and

black wig, another reversal of her trademark blonde. Here Camille is arguably the

“polluting person” not so in terms of disease, but when she dons the black wig, she

liberates herself to become a self-determining agent advocating for her individuality, and

not just a hanger-on wife. In essence, Camille becomes triumphantly dangerous, unruly,

foreign, and Other in the filmic space. Camille is the rebel outsider – self-liberated - who

with her darkness and red costume present a revisionist image of femininity.

More importantly, Camille takes on the traditionally male role emotionally, being

the stronger character, and Paul the reverse, thus confusing and subverting traditional

gender expectations. Paul’s uncertain behavior and self-contradiction undermine his

character not only in his wife’s eyes, but also in the audience’s esteem. He is a foil to

Camille’s certainty and strength, and we can understand why she grows to despise him,

just as we do also as we watch him falter and “dig his own grave” by constantly

questioning Camille why she no longer loves him—he is ironically turning his nagging

fear into a material reality. Performative speech acts (such as when Camille says “I know

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 you, Paul” to him and we know she is right) are enacted in the film which show her as an

empowered female character and serve to destabilize what is expected from this blonde

“28-year-old typist” as Paul dismissively categorizes her. There is conscious purpose to

her speech and the certainty in which she finally says to her husband after he pleads with

her to tell him why she no longer loves him, reveals her to be the emotionally-dominant

and emotionally-confident partner. Camille replies: “You’re not a man. There’s no way

I’ll ever love you again….Because, you no longer have the power to move me.”

Paul, on the other hand, is plagued by vacillations and doubts throughout the film.

Once he detects waning love and annoyance on Camille’s part, he begins to interrogate

her why, continually “picking the scab” of their diminishing (and deteriorating)

relationship. He attributes her lack of love to conventional reasons, such as Camille

having caught him flirting with the attractive secretary employed by Prokosch, or his

seeming to encourage the womanizing producer’s attentions on his wife, when all these

reasons only fuel Camille’s contempt for him. Paul’s speech is halting, uncertain, and

even self-contradictory, and when he cannot get a direct answer out of Camille for her

contempt, he resorts to physical violence multiple times in the film. His speech lacks the

“act”—the power—to make things happen in the real world, and his character is deflated

by obvious pretension to something more than he is (e.g., Paul says he is made for high

art such as writing for the theatre, but all he does in reality is write detective stories and

hack screenwriting for bogus American producer, Prokosch). Therefore, Paul’s weakness

as a character is another instrument to foreground Camille’s strength.

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 Another important segment is the apartment sequence where there are inserts of

12 shots of Camille/Bardot with accompanying voice-over narration by both her and Paul

(as if in dialogue) as images of Camille’s body float by. These shots are inserted into the

highly-charged moment when Camille tears open her red robe on the couch asking

sarcastically if Paul wants to make love to her right now, but “make it fast”. These 12

shots—both interpretive and parenthetical in the film narrative—resemble a Playboy

centerfold or pin-up posters (but with fragmentary body parts or head shots), which

resemble Mulvey’s idea of the audience’s desire for possession of the erotic image, “[a]ll

these secondary images [stills, posters, and pin-ups] are designed to give the film fan the

illusion of possession, making a bridge between the irretrievable spectacle and the

individual’s imagination”(Mulvey 161). Also, “the spectator finds a heightened relation to

the human body, particularly that of the star,” Mulvey suggests (Mulvey 161). The voice-

overs confessing the intimate feelings of the characters such as how they first fell in love

further complicate the sequence. As Mulvey states in her chapter, “The Pensive

Spectator,” “slowing down the illusion of natural movement…makes visible its

materiality and its aesthetic attributes, but also engages an element of play and of

repetition compulsion”(Mulvey 192). Here the director is enacting his own “play” with

the filmed image and dialectical possibilities through the consecutive visual images

crosscut with complex—often ironic—linguistic voice-overs made by the characters, as if

in internal monologue but when paired together create an overall dialogic effect. Hence,

the viewer has to pay attention to both image and sound (and if reading the subtitles also,

then it is image, sound, and text). In inserting the film narrative with this special 12-shot

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 sequence, the viewer can possess the screen images, but the images are de-eroticized by

their fragmentation and placement at a pivotal, tense moment of marital disintegration.

Using Judith Butler’s notion of troubling the accepted gender norm of what

“female” looks like, Bardot’s Camille is a prime example because her character

challenges these gender norms and defies the male order in the film. Bardot’s

characterization in Contempt resembles an impersonation of the docile “trophy wife,” but

ultimately transcends this limitation through personal agency and reversing the trap of

gender normativity. Camille embodies both a performative femininity and a filmic

construction. Through Camille’s deepening agency, the character destabilizes the

patriarchal, phallocentric order in the film and transcends the gender stereotype. Indeed,

she is a highly ambivalent character—defying easy definition—but a strong, empowered

one. She is able to make up her mind and stick to it. Her growing independence from her

husband commands audience respect. Godard plays with Bardot’s image and in several

instances the director intellectualizes Bardot’s onscreen persona, playfully (e.g., Camille

is seen reading film criticism in the bath and in another scene, she is sunbathing but with

a book—literally—covering her “derriere”). Even though she plays the docile wife at

first, she transforms into the totally self-assured and independent female who determines

her own path by the end of the film. While this progression of the character’s agency may

seem usual in film narratives (in that the female undergoes a learning and overcoming

process that strengthens her character), the way Camille is presented turns the easily

controlling gaze of the viewer into what I call a “liberated-neutral gaze”. Visually-

speaking, the camera becomes much more balanced between the male and female

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 protagonists, and does not privilege Camille in pleasure-arousing (and usually gratuitous)

close-up shots. I have noticed the camera work in this film favours objective shots,

tracking shots that balance the two protagonists in conversation, and few subjective shots.

This paper has chronicled some poignant features in the deconstruction of

Bardot’s screen persona, just as the film chronicles the disintegration of a marriage.

Brigitte Bardot’s character, Camille, in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt both encapsulates

and subverts the archetypal objectification of femininity imaged in film, and exposes the

troubling interaction of the screen persona and star image. “Unchallenged, mainstream

film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order”(Mulvey in

Norton 2183). However, in this particular film, this power dynamic is challenged and

subverted by the Bardot character. In many ways this character breaks out of the familiar

frame of fetishistic scopophilia and voyeuristic intent imposed on the female body.

Bardot’s character in this film “troubles” the usual idea of femininity and possesses

personal agency within the film narrative. Godard’s use of Bardot’s popular image and

her onscreen characterization to interrogate these troubling facets shows us a new way of

looking and hence, a way of being as well. Bardot’s singular image is at once glued to the

stereotype of femininity yet also powerfully transcends this stereotype in Godard’s

Contempt.

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 Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
1999.
Godard, Jean-Luc. (Director) Le Mépris. USA : Criterion Collection DVD, 2002.
Leitch, Vincent B. (Editor) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.
Moravia, Alberto. Contempt. New York: The New York Review of Books, 1999.
Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006.
-- Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, USA: Indiana University Press, 1989.

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