CONTEMPT Movie Review

Le Mepris
Il Disprezzo

Jean-Luc Godard's adaptation of Alberto Moravia's A Ghost at Noon stars Brigitte Bardot as the disgusted wife of a talented and formerly principled writer (Michel Piccoli) who signs to do a rewrite of The Odyssey for a vulgar American producer (Jack Palance). The fact that The Odyssey's director is to be Fritz Lang, and is actually played by Fritz Lang, adds far more than simply a knowing, inside wink to this legendary and recently restored dream of a film—it brings the fantasy-making apparatus full circle, forcing us to see that the creative process of making connections between art and life doesn't end at the edge of the screen. Contempt is so rich, so stuffed with ideas that Godard couldn't bear to toss out (unlike Palance, the predatory film-within-a-film's producer) that it becomes a veritable treasure trove of playful and disturbingly on-target observations about art, commerce, sex, and disillusionment; the long, brilliant sequence in which Piccoli and Bardot bicker and dig into each other's motives and “deconstruct” their relationship is painful, great, and like nothing you've ever seen on screen before. Photographed in deeply saturated, widescreen colors by Raoul Coutard and graced by a stunningly evocative score from Georges Delerue (partially borrowed with intelligence and wit by Martin Scorsese in his Casino), Contempt is a knockout—as much a hate letter to Hollywood as it is a love letter to all of cinema. Whether it is, as Sight & Sound's Colin McCabe claims, “the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe” is questionable; that it is indeed a great work of art is not.

NEXT STOP… Pierrot le Fou, The Player, Irma Vep

1964 102m/C IT FR Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Georgia Moll, Michel Piccoli; D: Jean-Luc Godard; W: Jean-Luc Godard; C: Raoul Coutard; M: Georges Delerue. VHS, LV COL