Playroom (12): Le Mempris

White walls hold their breath. A bed is made into a field. A man and a woman count each other’s features as if counting were a way to keep time from moving. The lens comes close and refuses to own what it touches. Skin, hair, shoulder, knee, toes, mouth, eyes, voice. The counting is inventory and lullaby at once. It is also already the evidence for a later hearing. Desire rehearses tenderness and tenderness rehearses power. Light insists upon colour and then withdraws so that colour can continue alone. The music remembers a sorrow not yet earned. The opening is a promise that the camera will be permitted to touch everything and will rescue nothing.

A producer loves money with the purity people reserve for gods they know to be false. He moves like a man trying to occupy three rooms at once. He translates need into orders and orders into compliments as if language were a switch with only two positions. He wants a film about a story older than money and insists that the story be new. He believes in speed and in a car that abolishes the space between a command and its consequences. A director older than everyone else and calmer than anyone else reads Homer as if between lines he might still find a shore from which the present could look tolerable. He works with the patience of a man who has accepted that patience will be mistaken for weakness. He films water as if water were the last actor to have kept its integrity. Between these two a writer in a hat discovers that the verb to agree can be conjugated into a thousand postures and that none of them are safety.

A woman stands beside this arrangement with the authority of a face that has learned what rooms do to faces. She is the centre precisely because the camera refuses to trap her in a centre. She belongs to movement in and out of frames. She is given every colour and none of the comfort colour usually grants. She speaks in sentences that are shorter than desire and longer than patience. She is asked by different men to play different parts and she refuses by performing exactly what is asked. The refusal is not visible at first because politeness remains a currency in circulation. In time the currency devalues. That is not her fault. It is the nature of money when used as a grammar for love.

The sea is already a judgement. It holds a blue that can be gentle at noon and lethal by three. Houses have been placed where cliffs wish to remember the dignity of stone. A terrace presents the idea of looking out as if looking out were a virtue. Colours are arranged in blocks that announce the certainty of paint before bodies complicate the palette. Red claims right angles. Yellow insists on cheerfulness it does not feel. White practises a discipline the people inside cannot sustain. A statue turns its head toward the horizon where stories are supposed to begin. The statue is made of what outlives story. Its calm is not encouragement. It is the indifference of matter to our idea of destiny.

The apartment in town is a stage for a quarrel that does not know its lines. The room is ordinary. The camera treats this as an honour. Doors become instruments. A bath is a harbour and a witness. The floor is a map of what cannot be crossed without permission. Speaking starts in flirtation and slides into arithmetic. Who said what and who accepted what and who looked at whom with the intention of escaping the look. The man tries to recover the opening inventory of love and finds that the inventory can be weaponised against him. The woman tries not to decide and discovers that not deciding is already a decision. The scene lengthens until time takes ownership. The audience realises that no cut will rescue anyone. Only attention will. Attention arrives too late to save the minute. It is on time to record it.

A film about a voyage is going to be made by people who are not able to move. The producer wants Odysseus to hurry. The director wants time to remain longer than an account. The writer offers to assist at both altars. He is asked to translate ambition into something that can be shot and to translate money into something that can be endured. The producer throws a typewriter as if words could be replaced by force. The writer keeps his hat on as if respect could be borrowed from costume. The woman watches both and declines to become the prize in a tournament. To decline is to place herself in danger because decline is an insult to people who convert insult into sport.

Language is another coastline. Everyone appears to understand and no one agrees what the words cost. English, French, Italian, German, the lazy Esperanto of cinema commerce, the more exact idiom of a master who knows that every word must belong to the shot that follows it. The writer speaks one thing and hears another spoken back in a different currency. The woman speaks once and the table rearranges itself. The producer speaks often and we learn to listen for what the furniture does when he arrives. Translation keeps the day moving. It is not a cure. It is the labour by which misunderstanding is made possible at scale.

In the studio the director points toward sea and sky and faces that have learned not to trust the people who look at them. He is playing himself and not playing himself and in this double duty he becomes the only honest worker left. He keeps reading a book no one else has time to finish. He refuses to raise his voice. He says that gods have not left but have become too respectful to be asked for favours. This is not irony. It is the accuracy of a man who has watched ambition wear out cameras and watched cameras outlive ambition. He stands near a statue as if requesting an introduction. The statue refuses. The refusal is gracious.

The car is the opposite of the statue. It moves toward outcomes, it shines as a threat. It contains a woman in the passenger seat and a man at the wheel who believes all roads obey him. The scripts in the back are rolled like promises that can be sold again tomorrow. The car is how the producer conducts diplomacy with the present. He drives, which is to say he moves through air that cannot argue. He arrives at a house that has been built to make men wish to be civil and he becomes more impolite. He is not a villain. He is the personification of a force that believes the shortest line must be the correct line. The woman has already learned that short lines are the most likely to be traps.

Colour grammar prevails over plot where plot would enjoy flattery. A corner of blue on the wall is a court of appeal. Red rescues manufacture from drudgery and presents it as dignity so that men in suits can call themselves makers. The woman moves through these primary claims and robs them of certainty by carrying a mood that colours cannot master. The score carries her like a tide that has decided to be present on land. When the music withdraws the colours look like declarations pinned to air. Declarations do not feed anyone. They are placed aside and we return to talk.The apartment scene is already a poem. The camera waits while we become equal to it. The arguments are not about fidelity or jealousy. They are about the double session of work and love in a world where work is measured by someone else’s clock and love by a silence no one but the two inside it can hear. The woman says you did not defend me. The man says I did not know I had to. She answers that not knowing is the act that cannot be forgiven. He calculates that to defend would have been a small lie in a room full of larger lies. She calculates that the lie would have saved a minute and that a minute is the only scale on which salvation can occur. The room exhausts itself and remains a room. The couple exhaust themselves and are no longer a couple. The camera remains as if to remind us that rooms outlast our uses for them.

On Capri geometry becomes law. Steps are statements. Horizon is a sentence without a subject. Wind is the only voice that does not enter the quarrel. The house is an argument in favour of lines and against excuses. A woman in a red towel on a roof is an image that wants to be a promise and remains an image. A man wearing a hat in that same frame is a hypothesis about authority dissolving under light. The ancient world is here in stone and limestone and in distances that make bodies honest whether they consent or not. The modern world is here in cameras and in the obligations attached to every bank transfer. Men who believe their intentions stand up to the sun learn that intention is a weak sunscreen.

The director films the Odyssey as if humility were the new technique. He does not need the new. He needs the right distance. He speaks to Homer across water in the tone one uses with a neighbour whose field has also suffered bad weather. The producer interrupts both the conversation and the weather. The writer tries to repair the interruption with words that will be translated again and again until meaning remains as a root nobody recognises. The woman stands apart and is mistaken for a symbol. She is not a symbol. She is the place where the film permits dignity to remain when dignity has been turned into an instrument.

We try to name what happens to her and discover that the vocabulary we brought from other books is clumsy. She is not merely bored. She is not merely hurt. She is not merely contemptuous. She is defending attention against the speed at which power erases it. Contempt in this geometry is not the noble hatred a tragic chorus might be asked to sing. It is the exact posture of a person who will not sell her minute to someone else’s timetable. When she chooses silence it is not passivity. It is the refusal to let a sentence complete itself in the wrong room. The man mistakes this for treason against him. It is loyalty to a measure of truth that predates him and outlasts him.

There is the gentlest of comedies in the studio when the director directs the director. Instructions are given to himself and to us. Cinema can correct cinema. A crane moves like a pen across the margin of sea. Extras stand like trees and trees perform like extras and both are dignified by the fact that the sun writes the same light on crown and on wig. The ancient story is told with an attention that refuses to become solemn. The producer cannot hear the tone. He keeps requesting pictures of bodies that will reassure investors who fear subtlety. He speaks as if flesh were a contract. The director answers with a gesture that is older than contracts. He turns away and looks at water.In the apartment an earlier minute continues to live inside us while island light tries to write over it. The quarrel is mobile. It relocates to a terrace and then to a car and then to a set and then to another room which is not domestic and is therefore less equipped to survive. The writer believes he can change everything if he looks noble enough in sunglasses. The woman shows him that a lens is not a shield. He removes his hat. He is still blind to the hour. The producer appears again like the loudest colour in a painting that had promised to be a landscape. He is never absent for long because absence would reduce his power. His presence is the price everyone else pays for having agreed to the work.

When the woman leaves the apartment in town she does not leave town. She leaves a version of herself stored in the eyes of the man she used to love. She refuses to be stored there. She takes with her the right to be a person whose decisions are not narrative devices. This is the scandal that the film is willing to protect. She can love without belonging and belong without consenting to disappearance. The city does not approve. The island does not care. The camera honours her by not waiting to see if she will reconsider.

An accident happens because accidents happen when people are in a hurry to resolve sentences that have been made too long. The car performs the mathematics of metal. The road withdraws its hospitality. The horizon observes and remains the horizon. Death arrives with the competence it always displays. The film does not trade in revenge. It refuses the melodrama of a moral. The accident is registered and included in the claims list that this world keeps with careful penmanship. A man continues to speak in a suit on a balcony and the suit keeps its meaning. A director continues to film the sea and the sea keeps its reluctance to be filmed. The woman is gone and yet the colour she carried continues to complicate every frame.

What remains is the question the title brings and does not answer. Contempt is the name given to a temperature between people when love recognises itself as a demand and refuses to become extortion. It is also the word power uses when it discovers that it cannot purchase assent at the rate it prefers. The film does not adopt the word as a flag. It holds it like a specimen. It allows light to pass through and asks us to consider the fractures. Scorn is easy. Withholding is safer and duller. This work shows a posture more dangerous and exact than either. A woman chooses to let another person continue without her rather than to accept a lie that would keep them in the same shot. The camera approves by keeping its distance.

Music returns again and again with a phrase that suggests desire and shore and the way an hour repeats its edges over weeks. The theme honours her because it does not beg. It knows the difference between returning and haunting. Colour, lines, glass, stucco, sea, tile, sheets, paper, hats, a towel, a knife, a cigarette, a marble balustrade, lips saying nothing and then saying something that cannot be unheard. The film places these where we can see them adjacent and then asks us to remember that adjacency often feels like causality and is not. We supply causality because we are impatient. The work insists on adjacency because it is honest.

The writer walks along the terrace of a house built for the pleasure of thinking. He tries to import significance. The house refuses. Significance is an export good here, carried out by eyes that have understood that looking and thinking are both improper when they forget their host. He meets the director again and asks whether art is still possible. The answer is so mild it could be mistaken for indifference. Art is possible when men permit the sea to be itself in their company. The writer hears and pretends he has heard. He returns to the producer because the producer pays the ferry.

Talk of fidelity to books and to people emerges and dissolves like foam. The Odyssey is not a set of instructions. It is the record of an intelligence that learned to be equal to weather. The moderns have the advantage of engines and the disadvantage of not believing in gods. They must invent their own supervision. Money tries to do that. Fame tries. Love tries. None of them succeed for long. The woman sees this sooner than the men because the world has taught her the price of delay. She steps aside. They continue.

A studio set makes a sky and then struggles to understand why the sky outside looks more artificial. The director smiles and waits for the light to choose. Extras complain and are paid. The shrimp vendor sells shrimp. The assistant is polite to equipment. The writer tries to arrange his hair. The producer counts by glancing at watches that do not belong to him. The woman is present and absent and the camera refuses to decide on our behalf which matters more. The theme returns and turns the light into a story that an ear can keep when eyes have grown tired.

The film is full of reading. Books are shown as volumes that wish to be touched and not displayed. Lines are quoted without exegesis. Names are said not for glamour but because the present cannot forgive itself for having outlived them. The director respects this guilt but does not share it. He knows that the world does not die when a work is completed. The world looks for the next craftsperson willing to keep attention moving at the rate of breath. He will keep the memory of Homer in the way he keeps memory of the water at a corner of a terrace. He will refuse to use either as proof.

Even the minor gestures achieve authority by refusing to exaggerate. A pair of shoes placed beside a bed. A mirror that cannot be trusted and therefore is honest. A line of trucks taking equipment from one shore to another as if transporting conscience. A hand on a shoulder that is not a claim but a statement of presence. These remain because the film gives them the same weather as the arguments. No minute is penalised by triviality. That is the sharpest rebuke a work can offer to a world that pays by spectacle.

The last images are neither summation nor relief. The camera looks where it has already looked and finds the light has changed. A director speaks a few lines that resemble gratitude and foreknowledge both. The sea remains. The house remains. Paper remains. The person in the hat stands like a figure in a fresco that has lost colour but not the profile of a mouth deciding whether to smile. We are given the day as if the day were a surface upon which nothing could permanently adhere and yet everything leaves a trace. The woman’s absence is the most present of the traces. She is what the work has protected, not her body that had been offered as a flexible asset, but the right she exercised to keep a minute intact.

Leaving the room we carry a new courtesy toward walls and toward people in rooms with walls. We have learned that to speak one sentence less can be the most faithful act available. We set a hand upon a table and remember that tables are not stages unless we make them so. We walk streets that are not Capri and find that the colours still behave like a discipline when we let them. A poster flirts with us in a language that thinks it knows our appetite. We answer with the knowledge that appetite is not the same thing as hunger. The distinction holds because a camera kept us company while it learned the difference.

Someone will ask whether the film despises its characters. It does not. It despises the excuse by which men ask to be loved for injuries they could have prevented by paying attention. It honours the labour by which a woman refuses to complete a sentence that would reduce her to a moral. It respects the cunning by which a director made of commerce a passable vehicle for a form of prayer. It recognises the innocence by which a producer tells himself he is building something simply because he pays for it. It keeps the world within reach and refuses to tidy it into a demonstration.

If there is a lesson it is only that love without measurement becomes ideology and work without tenderness becomes theft. The minute in which these are recognised as one fact is the minute in which contempt can be put down like a tool at the end of a long day. The world returns in its ordinary surprise. A woman stands at a window that she will open if she chooses. A man sits with his hands in his lap because he has learned that hands are heavy when they have nothing to fix. A director looks at sea and plans again to film water as if it could stand being seen one more time. The present remains an unfaithful companion. The film has taught us how to remain with it without becoming unfaithful to ourselves.