I must admit, Godard is growing on me. Here are films one can have a proper debate over, unlike most of what Hollywood produces these days. As with good novels, they are ambiguous and open to interpretation. I just watched his Le Mepris, and it feels like I have just finished a good book.

Le Mepris is about Paul, a screenwriter-cum-playwright and his relationship with his girlfriend, Camile, which is on the verge of breaking up. Paul is writing a screenplay for an adaptation of Homer’s Ulysses, and there’s quite a lot of debate between Paul and his producer, Prokosch, over the relationship between Ulysses and his wife, Penelope. Thus there’s a dualism between Paul, engaged on the ‘journey inward’ that off writing – and the ancient Greek hero. Of course this ends in tragedy when Camile and Prokosch die in a car accident – perhaps in retribution for tempting the gods. Thus, Godard is drawing allusions to the classics while forming a new style of film.

On a separate note, what interests me about Godard is his style. He is like nothing I have seen before, with his abrupt changes of music and flashes of colour. At first, these appalled me, as they were so different to what we are all used to. Yet, I realise now that Godard was not just being pretentious but revolutionary, deliberately testing the boundaries of film. I personally think that these boundaries don’t exist, and that filmic grammar is not at all rigid. Indeed, directors like Godard suggest that such grammar is purely aesthetic (much more so than with writing and natural language) and can be done away with altogether.