A house of rites and rituals. How the villa of Le Mépris became a catwalk.
Casa Malaparte, the villa that belonged to writer, socialite and director Curzio Malaparte and that appeared in the film by Jean-Luc Godard has been chosen by Jacquemus for its 15th anniversary show.
‘A house of rituals and rites, it is a house of mysteries, it at once brings forth the chill of the Aegean on the horn head of past sacrifices, it is an ancient play placed in an Italian light.’ With these words the American architect and artist John Hejduk described Casa (or Villa) Malaparte in the pages of Domus in 1980.
The villa built at the behest of the writer Curzio Malaparte at Punta Massullo, Gulf of Capri, has long fascinated architects and intellectuals, and also became the dreamlike and alienating set of Le Mépris (aka Contempt, 1963), the film by Jean-Luc Godard based on Alberto Moravia’s 1956 novel of the same name. An architectural, literary and cinematic landmark, but also a landmark of etiquette: Casa Malaparte is first and foremost an enigma.
This was understood by the fashion industry too. At first by Karl Lagerfeld who in the late 1990s dedicated an entire book to the mansion (Steidl, 1999) featuring a series of photographs shot on site during a five-day stay in November 1997. Now by Jacquemus, the French maison that chose the villa as the setting for its cruise to celebrate its 15th anniversary.
There are echoes of the Mediterranean elegance that belonged to the master of the house, but also to Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli who inhabited it, albeit temporarily, in front of Godard’s camera. References to European cinema of the 1960s are no new to Jacquemus. More precisely in the recent campaign for the Calino bag, which was soundtracked by Nora Orlandi’s seductive music for Il dolce corpo di Deborah (1968), from the CAM Sugar catalogue.
Taking on his Instagram account, Simon Porte Jacquemus, founder of the maison, wrote: ‘This photograph of Karl Lagerfeld opened the door to his house for me. Last year at the Met Gala in honour of Karl Lagerfeld, the print of this picture embroidered on my jacket caught the attention of the owner of the house. They were touched and decided to invite me to stay at the house. This is how I start the conversation. So special.’
Isolated and monolithic, surrounded only by the sea and vegetation, Casa Malaparte is reminiscent of another auteur house inextricably linked to the history of cinema: Dante Bini’s concrete dome for Michelangelo Antonioni in Costa Paradiso, Sardinia.
The villa in the Gulf of Capri, instead, was designed by Adalberto Libera, one of the masters of Italian modernism, who sketched it in 1938, on land bought two years earlier for 12,000 lire by Malaparte from the fisherman Antonio Vuotto.
It is said that Malaparte argued with the famous architect and then completed the work with the help of Adolfo Amitrano, a local stonemason.
The curse of the villa thus seems to leave no peace even to those who habit it, although briefly. More than twenty years later, Godard too found himself in a quarrel with Carlo Ponti, who seems to mirror Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance) the eccentric producer at the centre of the film’s events. Ponti deemed Godard’s director’s cut too long and complicated, ordering a new editing to be made for the Italian and Spanish distribution. One that the French director always refused to recognise and accept. For this version new music was also composed, to replace that of Georges Delerue. Piero Piccioni was called in, coming up with – one could argue – a more multifaceted score than the original, rich in jazz, Hammond phrases and exotica tapestries.
Many artists and intellectuals have hence tried to capture the essence of the villa. Piccioni and Delerue in music, Godard with his camera, Bruce Chatwin with words, ‘A Homeric ship run dry’. As a matter of fact, in the meta-fiction of the film, Fritz Lang (playing himself) is busy directing his take on the Odyssey, to the great discouragement of producer Jerry Prokosch. It is at this point that screenwriter Paolo Javal (Michel Piccoli) is hired, arriving on the set with his wife Emilia (Brigitte Bardot). Here they will be hosted by Prokosch in his villa in Capri, Casa Malaparte, whose architectural and atmospheric grandeur will enter into the dynamics of the couple’s marital crisis.
Topping and dominating the building is the solarium, a long, flat surface, to which the imposing staircase leads, metaphorically stretching to the sky, to infinity. The solarium – the line of demarcation between the sea and the sky –, is the setting for one of the cult scenes of Le Mépris, or at least one of those that has sedimented most in the collective imagination: Brigitte Bardot, naked, lying in the sun, only an open paperback covering her backside, which also serves as a bookmark.
And again, Bardot walking down the metaphysical staircase in a yellow terrycloth bathrobe, alongside Michel Piccoli in an off-white suit and dark trilby hat. Summer looks that seem lost today. How do times change, but Casa Malaparte remains untouched, seraphic and totemic, an ancestral monolith that seems to have run dry in the Neapolitan gul, as Chatwin noted.
Opening image: Frame from Le Mépris, Jean-Luc Godard, 1963.