Godard uses the movie to reflect upon his own relationship, when Paul uses Odyssey, the movie in the movie, to reflect upon his relationship with Camille. It is very interesting that the line of Ulysses and Penelope matches and intertwines with the line of Paul and Camille. This is achieved through both the narrative components, which are the discussions, especially those between Fritz Lang and Paul, with key words such as “tragic,” “destiny,” “life,” and “death,” and the non-diegetic inserts of the statues of gods.
The colors used on the statues are carried over to the settings and costumes. We see white, ignorance and unconsciousness, used as the skin color of the gods and on the carpet that Camille lays on when she reflects upon her state of mind. Red and blue are used on the pupils and lips of the statues. As I believe, they represent love/passion and tragedy, respectively. Yellow is the color of their sheet under natural light and is the color that Vanini, the translator, wears the most. It could be understand as the “neutral” color, the color of life.
At the beginning of the story, Paul and Camille speak their loves for each other in saturated red light. Later, Vanini changes from a yellow sweater to a red one right before the time when Camille caught Paul touching her. Later in the film, Camille acerbically “invites” Paul on a red sofa. All these suggest the color red as a symbol of the dangerous love and passion.
The color blue is used more and more extensively towards the end of the film. The blue sofa, instead of red, in the producer’s villa, serves as a signal of a series of following tragedies. Later, Paul and Camille have their last talk by the sea. On the stair that Paul sits on, there is a line of blue letters (which I did not have the time to read; yet I do think there is the word “passe”). Camille clearly goes beyond and thus passes that stair and walks into the sea. My worries of coming danger and tragedy gradually built up. Eventually, Camille dead in a car accident with the producer, one wearing blue and one wearing red. The colors at this moment almost become a symbol of destiny itself. In the last plot, Paul goes up the stairs to watch the shooting of Ulysses’s first sight of Ithaca after ten years. He passes by an empty red chair and a blue one and sees Ulysses looking into the sea in his blue robe. Tragedy is going to fall on Ulysses, and it has already fallen on Paul.
以金钱为准则的爱情悲剧
