From the Ledge

Last Monday, I finally left the ranks of the eight people or so in the whole city that have not yet seen The Dark Knight.  I’m normally not a comic book kind of guy, but what with all the hype, hysteria, and never-ending water cooler discussions about the movie, plus my own inherent curiosity about how good Heath Ledger’s last film performance was, I just had to bite the bullet and go.  Plus, I did see the original Batman with Michael Keaton, and the super-campy one with the codpieces and the plastic nipples with George Clooney and Chris O’Donnell, and truth be told, enjoyed both of them; and I’m a big fan of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, so this movie couldn’t be all bad.  And it wasn’t (although I felt it could have ended at least forty minutes earlier than it did).  Two days later, I managed to catch one of the last screenings of Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1960s classic, Contempt (Le Mepris), during its limited revival at the Music Box Theater.  Many film scholars consider Contempt as an aberration in the Godard oeuvre – it is his one foray into commercial cinema, with a narrative that is somewhat more accessible than his other masterpieces.  While The Dark Knight is absolutely not at the cinematic level of Contempt, one of the pinnacles of world cinema, I couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity between Nolan’s and Godard’s ambitions and achievement. The Dark Knight takes the comic book genre and the generic Hollywood blockbuster and both adhered to, and refreshed and re-imagined, their conventions:  amidst the multitude of breathtaking, blazing, action movie set pieces is a reflective tale of the inherent fallibility of human nature and the near-impossibility of categorizing who is a hero and who is a villain, who is virtuous and who is weak-willed.  Contempt, on the other hand, also takes the conventions of 1960s Cinemascope, “international co-productions”, which it can be initially lumped with, such as panoramic, bright-hued views of Capri, characters who speak in English, Italian, and French, and abundant female pulchritude (in this case Brigitte Bardot’s) and wrapped a compelling story of various levels of breakdowns (marital, artistic, virtue) around them, using risky but innovative directorial techniques such as a 35 minute sequence shot in near real time in the closed quarters of an apartment.

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