Contempt (1964)

I love this movie so much

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

In a career spanning decades, Jean-Luc Godard has proved himself to be among the greatest of all French filmmakers. Even in his very earliest work, he formed many masterpieces, and among the greatest of these masterpieces is the 1963 film about film, "Contempt".Part black comedy,part meta-satire, part tense psychological drama, and part romantic tragedy, "Contempt" is a cinematic sea of often haunting emotion. Mixing the witty and comic with the downright painful, this is a masterful study of the collapsing of a marriage set against the backdrop of a satirical study of the chaotic process of movie making (in a similar vein to "8 1/2").Godard's cinema is that of a radical style. While this is among his most toned down and straightforward films, it is still a work of often avant garde brilliance, one dipped in some of Godard's most amusing dialogue and attractive scenery. The character face pitiful and tense melodrama behind the masterwork's poignant score. Luscious views of oceans and gorgeous beach like landscapes are shot with the same epic quality as screening rooms and apartment buildings. Through Godard's sometimes twisted lens, a hellish odyssey is made surreal and powerful more so than it would be in the hands of almost any other filmmaker.Any strong fans of Godard will likely love this film as I did, while more average moviegoers certainly have the potential to find a gemstone of art as long as they have the patience.

It is quite strange to see Jean-Luc Godard making a movie about the deconstruction of a couple, but "Le Mépris" is with no doubt his best film and one of the best ever made. A screenwriter called Paul Javal receives a proposal to make new scenes for the cinematic adaptation of the book The Odyssey, however, his wife Camille begins to despise the little things he does, then the couple start to breakup. In addition to being visually beautiful and having one of the best movie soundtracks, the performances do not fall short, especially Brigitte Bardot, the film has a cameo from legendary director Fritz Lang (Metropolis and M), was also the first big budget film by Jean-Luc Godard, but that is little noticed in the film. The film creates an analogy between the story of the protagonist of the book The Odyssey with Camille and Paul are going through, the beauty of the images, well, almost everything works on this masterpiece. Cinema should be like life, and "Le Mépris" or Contempt is a tragic but visually beautiful depiction of it.

Before I begin, I feel I should give some of my background: I only studied a little bit movies in school (not that I think that should matter) and I have seen relatively few classics, but I still enjoyed some of them. I also watched the movie with subtitles (I don't know French, German, or Italian). I feel the need to provide others with an opinion that differs from the high rating it has received so far.The movie starts off promising with a few interesting characters, such as Prokosch and Lang, along with the gorgeous Camille and the interesting "movie-in-a-movie" premise (which is less consequential as the movie continues). Without any explanation, Camille takes on the character she will be the remainder of the movie; an enigmatic and flippant wife who misinterprets a transportation hiccup (or correctly interprets her husband's conniving) and inexplicably stops loving him. In fact, the synopsis ought to have a spoiler alert because he only figures that out at the end. Her husband tirelessly (to me, it's past any realistic level tirelessness) tries to get any response out of her. This continues for the whole movie and only slightly differentiates as the movie continues.Lang and Prokosch are not developed much more and become static elements to the story, which I find lazy. The soundtrack is maniacally repetitive and is applied almost disjointedly from the action in the film. To me, it feels like they had only two or three melodies composed and recorded and decided to use them over and over again regularly without much regard for plot. The ending gave me no emotion except for the relief that was over.I'm not sure if this movie is considered "good" (7.8 rating at the time of my writing) because of some social or historical importance or the allegorical references regarding Homer's Odyssey, but those pluses are far too subtle to me. While I find Hollywood movies typically too explanatory, this is same magnitude on the other end of the spectrum. The characters are irrational and one dimensional, which eliminated my empathy for them and the movie became annoying.If annoyance is the point of the movie, then the director succeeded. I think the director, producers, and crew wanted to make this movie their vacation so they could go to some villa by the seaside, drive around in a nice Alfa Romeo, film Bridgitte Barot and other women naked, and flex their cinematography muscles in that conveniently planned apartment. If you look at it that way, this movie may be more enjoyable. This movie could make more sense and be more enjoyable if it were shorter and had a couple more lines in it.

From director Jean-Luc Godard (À Bout De Soufflé (Breathless), Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou), featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die this French/Italian film had an average rating by critics, but the cast certainly appealed to me, I was going to watch no matter what anyway. Basically respected Austrian director Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, Metropolis) has been hired by American film producer Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance) to direct a film adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, but the script needs a lot of work, so novelist and playwright Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is hired to rework the script, as Prokosch is not satisfied with Lang's treatment of the material as an art film. With the conflicts of artistic expression and commercial opportunity are going on Paul is becoming estranged from his wife Camille Javal (Brigitte Bardot), and after being left alone with millionaire playboy Prokosch they may be developing intimate feelings for each other. The story seems to parallel with aspects of director Godard's own life, but the main point as far as I can tell is that there are dodgy or greedy dealings of money during the film production, and it eventually ends with contempt and the marriage of Camille and Paul destroyed. Also starring Giorgia Moll as Francesca Vanini. I will be absolutely honest and say that this film is rather hard to follow, I understand it works well as an insight into the events you get on a film set with some mockery thrown in, and I found Bardot, clothed and unclothed, fascinating to watch, but the little story is confusing, the switch between spoken languages adds to the confusion, what I could keep up with though was relatively interesting, so I suppose it's not a completely wasted satire. Worth watching!