See the movie, then read the book may not be a great idea. Still less so after your third time with the movie. The more faithful it is to the book, the more likely the film in your head is going to crowd out your experience of words on the page. And Albert Moravia’s writing could be more vulnerable to that effect than most: his prose is so clear, efficient, concrete, “transparent.” Moravia thinks cinematically, and has a beautifully cinematic sense of narrative timing, not surprisingly for someone who, even before setting his 1954 novel Contempt in the movie world, had written film criticism, collaborated on several scripts, and even directed his own short. Yes, Contempt. One of Jean-Luc Godard’s early masterworks, his “new traditional film” as the original 1963 trailer called it, with Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, and Michel Piccoli starring, and the Casa Malaparte in Capri as a setting: the cinematic imagery is bound to be seared into the viewer’s memory. Poor Moravia. The film follows the book closely enough, albeit with due compression: a impecunious writer, infatuated with his beautiful wife, is hired to script a film adaptation of the Odyssey—in Moravia’s novel, to be directed by a German of the Weimar era, described as “certainly not in the same class as the Pabsts and Langs” but “worthy of respect”; in Godard’s film, all the better, the director is Fritz Lang himself, resplendently monocled (and not without reciting Hölderlin, as I did in this diary just last week). Suddenly the writer finds his adored wife out of love with him; it’s no spoiler to tell you she will eventually run off with the film’s shrewd but vulgar producer. But Godard overcomes the book’s big drawback: Moravia’s tale is fatally encased by the limited viewpoint of its insufferable, rather nebbishy first-person protagonist. Starchily self-conscious about being a narrator (“I do not wish to give a description here of our dinner in all its details but merely to report my own state of mind”), he thinks he can reason his way through feelings, and feel his way through reason, and he never gets it right; the effect is like being stuck with a Sartrean existentialist who lacks the requisite self-critical lucidity or philosophical depth. Driving the Sartre connection home, at one point our protagonist, embracing his alienated wife, finds her hand “dangling and inert,” exactly like the woman’s hand in the famous chapter on “Bad Faith” in Being and Nothingness. As played by Piccoli, the film’s protagonist is both tougher and smarter than the novel’s—though still not smart or tough enough to do himself any good. And of course in the film we see him in his world, rather than seeing his world through him, dodging claustrophobia—and then Godard’s sense of irony is of a different order, not existentialist but Brechtian, and he’s not averse to broadening the irony into straight-out humor. This makes a big difference at the end, which seems arbitrary in the novel. The film glories in the arbitrariness and makes it the point, a fake-tragic ending to match the fake happy ending of The Threepenny Opera. Godard’s instincts in choosing Contempt for cinematic transposition were nonpareil. In retrospect, it’s not for the plot or characters but for Moravia’s jaundiced view of the Italian film business that the novel is most entertaining. And how he understood that world! The idea of making brassy adaptation of the Odyssey might have seemed merely comical in 1954; four years later, the Italian Steve Reeves vehicle Hercules became a hit, the first of a long string of made-in-Italy mythological and quasi-classical epics. Moravia’s protagonist may be disgusted by his producer’s “taste [which] was still that of the Italian producers of the time of D’Annunzio”—the decadent poet, that is, who had written the script for the 1914 blockbuster Cabiria, which had introduced the Hercules-like character of Maciste, who would be the hero of some twenty-five Italian movies between 1960 and 1965—but he was ahead of his time. Moravia saw it coming. He should have been a producer.
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Alberto Moravia, Contempt, translated by Angus Davidson, introduction by Tim Parks, is published by New York Review Books, New York, 1999.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.