“Chekhov’s Gun” is a commonly-quoted dramatic principle underscoring the necessity of every element of a narrative story. If a gun is shown in the first act, it must be fired in the third. Elements that do not impact the story — unfired guns — should be removed entirely, so as not to make false promises or clutter the story with unnecessary details. Chekhov’s principle is intrinsically related to foreshadowing, and there are several ways to use it. You can use it well, giving your story the qualities of a fine-tuned machine. You can use it poorly, relying on it as a crutch such that your story loses its natural, organic feeling. Or you can use it like Jean-Luc Godard uses it in Contempt: as a massive fuck you to anyone who dares insist that dutifully following the rules is going to make your story better.
It’s more complicated than that, of course, but the handgun that appears in Contempt is indeed shown several times with great intention. It is never fired, nor is it brandished with the threat of being fired, nor is its owner really the type of man who would ever shoot anyone. That man is Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a screenwriter working on a new adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey while contending with pressure from his American producer Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) and navigating marital strife with his spouse Camille (Brigitte Bardot). After a mere glimpse at Paul we understand he is not the type of man to resort to violence, much as we understand after Contempt‘s opening shot that Godard is not the type of director who’d forget that he put a loaded gun in the hand of his hero.
War movies don’t vary much. Customarily, this genre has a singular focus: examination of an individual (a soldier, usually) inside of a system (the military, usually). Wherever the film goes from there, it can typically still be traced back to that configuration of a singular unit as part of the greater whole. The individual is entrenched — to nick a military phrase — within the system, even if the premise of the film is to have that character reconcile with or refute the system itself. And in some ways this is technically true of Beau travail, the 1999 drama by Claire Denis, as it follows young soldiers training inside the construct of the French Foreign Legion. But the treatment of those individuals and that system is so unlike that which is described above, so unique in its presentation, that Beau travail can hardly be called a war film at all.
Motion State Review 