It is this music that haunts him in his sleep ever since. Music that Georges Delerue composed in 1963 for Godard’s “Contempt”, a musical theme inextricably linked to the Bardot on the Malaparte terrace in Capri.

Phrasal music that seems to unequivocally reflect how (female) beauty can have something morbid. The male gaze dominates, but in the background it is subject to the images that he himself chooses to create.

It’s a combination of things: Be-Be’s insistent figure, slumped face down in the sun, with a girlish leg raised, casually and devilishly. This is Capri itself, with its sheer cliffs and the Mediterranean Sea stretching around, this is the architecture of the house of Malaparte, this shrewd, uneconomical writer-journalist. This is Delerue’s evocative music, the famous “Camilla theme” (i.e. Bardo), which is like a reminder of wine and ugly memory (the same music would be played thirty years later in the earthly hell “Casino” by Scorsese).

This is one of those moments when you realize that you are standing in front of the history of cinema.

“Contempt” will continue to combine the Homeric epic Ulysses with the market logic of Hollywood, the legend who heard the name of Fritz Lang, with the “cowboy” Jack Palance, the sensitive but at the same time obsessive Michel Piccoli as Paul Zaval, with the fugitive. Be like Camilla, raw lust with the rawest emotions, cinematic technique with narrative heat.

Paul and Camille chatting in the apartment, the camera follows them: the harrowing travelogue of the still-growing nouveau riche captures the painful breakup of the relationship: she accuses him of “selling out” her to please the producer, and throws herself into the arms of the producer as would say: be careful what you wish for.

This is one of those moments when you realize that you are standing in front of the history of cinema. Or in front of the iconic scene of the 60s in the middle of the Mediterranean. It’s like time stopped for a while to exist. You can stand in every frame, you can analyze the montage to reveal the deeper nature of the story, you can simply let yourself be in the sights and sounds that create worlds that follow you even after everything has been muted or turned off.

When you close your eyes, you can still hear Camilla’s theme. Her raised foot on the roof symbolizes every cinematic philology. Godard looks at it through the camera. The sun burns him, but he knows this is a rare and precious moment. Lust alone would be nothing without contempt.