2/5 not good
  by jon grife (maryland)
i love great movies. i didn't understand this movie at all. it seemed very indulgent and lacked passion and meaning. it lacked heart and soul. i have seen several french films and they all seem to disappoint in some ways. they share a warped sense of love, relationships and romance that i find wierd and uninteresting. perhaps a better background in the Odyssey and Homer's work is required as it was alluded to throughout the film. don't waste your time with this flick. see something else.

3/5 Godard's best?
  by Cosmoetica (New York, USA)
Of the films I've seen so far of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, his best is 1963's Contempt (Les Mépris), adapted by Godard from Alberto Moravia's novel Il Disprezzo, published in English as The Ghost At Noon. That statement should not be taken as an acknowledgment of greatness, for although this is his best film, it is not close to being a great film for, despite a gorgeous aping of the Michelangelo Antonioni style of shooting widescreen landscapes and affinity for formal structures, the film lacks any of the metaphysical heft and narrative thrust that propel the best of Antonioni's work, such as La Notte or Blowup. If Antonioni were more pretentious and less a wellspring of ideas, he would have made Contempt. That said, it's not a bad film, and it does exert an odd power over the viewer, above and beyond the nude ogling of a sexy, young, and ineffably feline Brigitte Bardot.... While clearly influenced by Antonioni's L'Avventura- although shot in color, especially in the scenes at Capri, at the famous Malaparte Villa, replete with wedge shaped brick and stone stairs and crags that rise from the sea, cinematographer Raoul Coutard displays that he actually had talent, unlike some of the earlier, visually sloppier films of Godard. The red, yellow, white, and blue palette Technicolor scheme also is effectively evoked to give the film a look that is more modern than many contemporary films, as well as being more modern and mature in the screenplay and attitudes- despite its flaws. Coutard also makes great use of the Cinemascope wide shots- called Francescope in this production, as characters are constantly and interestingly framed at the edged of the screen. Another plus is the use of flashbacks and flashforwards as voiceovers rove, for this effectively demonstrates the faronzaled attitudes of the characters. A big negative, however, is the Georges Delerue score. The main theme herks and jerks into inappropriate scenes, and often adds a melodramatic touch that is almost laughable. It also rises up and cuts off without warning, or any relation to the onscreen goings on, and each instance of its use progressively weakens its impact. In the commentary, Stam claims that the music is used as punctuation on dramatic and/or important moments, but this is simply not so. It is undisciplined and poorly applied. To say the least, Godard was no Werner Herzog with soundtracks.
This sort of artistic anomy- along with that in other aspects of the film, may make many vapid critics masturbate, but great art is not the child that such bears. Too much is left open ended in the film, and that which is resolved simply is not that fascinating, since the viewer is never given enough to care about the characters. In this sense, Godard shares as much `contempt' for his viewers as many of the bad Hollywood films, and the material machinations that produce them, this film seems to criticize. Still, it is his most successful film at connecting with an audience, more so than that other reflexive 1963 opus on filmmaking, Federico Fellini's 8½; although Contempt is not as good a film. Nor is it as nearly as cogent a comment on marriage as either Antonioni's La Notte nor Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage. The thirty minute interlude, especially, pales in comparison to Bergman's crackling and realistic, if intelligentsia-laden, repartee.
One wonders what might have occurred had Godard done more big budget films, for the rigor of having to meet some others' expectations disciplined him, and toned down his most masturbatory tendencies. Unfortunately, he never again went so mainstream, a thing which is often a pox on an artist- think about all the Hollywood films of the last thirty years, or that Chick Lit that you are reading, but which occasionally can help a `fringe' artist, with delusions of grandeur and an empty philosophy, mediate into excellence. Without it, Godard is simply Godard, and Contempt a beautiful film that is lifeless and flaccid, where nothing happens. It is populated by mannekins which have no lives of their own. This makes for a pretty window display, but gets old quickly after you've taken it all in.


3/5 Beneath Contempt
  by Randy Keehn (Williston, ND United States)
I'm always interested in seeing films with a strong reputation. I had seen a previous movie by Godard ("Breathless") which left me underwhelmed but I decided to try again. I had a rough idea of the plot of "Contempt" and I was interested that Jack Palance was in a starring role. I was confused by the artistic painting that is shown with the film's title. It looked to me like the face of Christ on the Cross. Seeing it on a large screen, I realized that it was just the opposite.

What is the purpose of "Contempt"? From reviews I have glanced through, this movie is Godard's expression of his opinion of Hollywood films (and the one-word title of the film is a more succinct expression of the same). I guess the abusive, mindless, domination of the character of the producer (played by Palance) was the key to this expression of distaste. However, while I can appreciate the sentiment, I felt Godard showed his own shortcomings by portraying the producer so stereotypically. With a man of Palance's talent, a more in-depth portrayal would, in my opinion, enhance the point rather than trivialize it. The footage we get from the film-within-a-film is certainly one I wouldn't care to see. That may have been the point but why? I was looking forward to seeing Fritz Lang but that was anticlimatical as well. The one aspect of "Contempt" that I found compelling was the breakdown of the marriage of the characters played by Bridgette Bardot and Michel Piccoli. That part drew me in and, while I could only guess at the reasoning behind the breakup, I certainly was able to sense the inbalance of their relationship. I suppose that this was a statement that Hollywood films convey a lot of shallow emotion. Granted. However, I prefer to get more in return for giving such a film my own emotional involvement. I have seen references to films that reviewers cite as movies that need to be seen at least several times before they can truly be appreciated. The irony of "Contempt" is that it left me with no interest in watching it again unlike the Hollywood productions that I do watch repeatedly. Some would say that statement was a comment on me. I say it is a comment on Godard.

3/5 Coldness and Film
  by Daitokuji31 (Black Glass)
Over the past two years as I've been studying Japanese New Wave films intently, I've also delved into films that are prominent in the French New Wave of filmmaking because of its supposed influence on the Japanese New Wave. While I have not explored as many French New Wave as I need to in order the give more educated views of its films and the time period in which they were filmed, I have been fortunate enough to watch some stellar films by Francois Truffaut, Agnes Varda, and, of course, Jean-Luc Godard. Unfortunately, most of the films that I have watched by Godard have left me underwhelmed. I enjoyed Breathless, Band of Outsiders, and Masculin, feminin, found Alphaville and Pierrot le Fou tolerable, and detested Weekend. I let a year almost go by without watching a Godard film, but knowing his importance in French filmmaking and filmmaking in general, I decided to watch his only international large budget film Contempt (1963).

Contempt opens with Camille's, Brigitte Bardot, lovely and very bare backside in full view for the audience to see, Bardot's nude figure being something that Godard's producers told him to add to the film, as she and her husband Paul lounge around in bed as he tells her how beautiful her various body parts are. Soon after this loving moment, Paul and Camille go to see Jeremy Prokosch, Jack Palance, a rich, arrogant producer who wants Paul rewrite a script based on Homer's The Odyssey for the German director Fritz Lang, who plays himself in the film, to direct. Paul is a bit at odds with himself because of the deal. He does not want to work for Prokosch, but he will be offered a large sum of money if he does so. While struggling with these thoughts, Prokosch meets Paul's lovely wife and offers to give her a ride to meet Lang. She doesn't want to go with the man, but Paul lightly insists that she should go, and this is when the trouble begins for Paul. Only moments earlier completely in love with him, Camille's love for Paul has been completely destroyed because, in her mind, he gave her to Prokosch. Paul is ignorant of his being a jerk, and so opens the long hard road to contempt and hated.

Contempt is often viewed by critics as Godard's memorial to filmmakers, like Lang, of the past who were able to truly create masterpieces without being hindered by producers. While I agree that Contempt is definitely an important film and that its aesthetics of space and light are extraordinarily well done, I found the film to be quite boring. However, the boredom I felt was not the type of boredom that I feel watching a bad film, it was instead a heavy boredom brought on me by the weight that Paul was feeling struggling with the decision to write the screenplay or not while trying to figure out why his wife had become so cold for him. While I cannot recommend Contempt to casual fans of Godard and French Cinema, I can recommend it to those who want to watch a film that is important to the history of the French New Wave and who are fans of Bardot.
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1/5 A disappointing inside joke
  by Cynthia Glenn (Seattle, wa United States)
I have to disagree with all the reviews. I am a film buff and love older movies. However, I think all the reviewers (and many national critics) have been blinded by Godard's reputation retroactively. The movie has interesting pieces and beautiful cinematography in the final third. However it is shot through with meandering asides, swipes at Godard's producer, and long "intellectual" quotes from people Godard agrees with. This is hardly good filmmaking!! He was striking back at the studio system which he disagreed with, but to drag the audience through his personal antipathies doesn't advance the story and is frankly, a bore. I purposefully didn't read anything about this movie before I rented it and it is a LONG slog. Again, interesting for a film student, but if you want to see a fine older French film, try Truffaut's "400 Blows" instead.