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Contempt - Criterion Collection Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 19 Reviews)

Captivé, fasciné, subjugué
Godard est peut-être le seul réalisateur à ne pas avoir eu peur du mythe BB. Le résultat est magnifique : la présence de Bardot, la musique de Delerue, la villa de Malaparte à Capri, le tout réuni avec maestria par Godard adaptant Moravia font de ce film magique un sortilège de séduction irresistible.

A Production Within a Film
When you're married to beautiful, glamorous women as our director
extraordinaire, Jean-Luc-Godard, you have your moments of doubt. You
are an ordinary physical specimen and she is well, Anna Karina, or in
the case of Godard's alter ego, screenwriter, Paul Javal, you have many
moments of self-doubt from bedroom to soundstage with the nubile
Brigitte Bardot. If I give you $30,000 in 1963 money, may I sleep with
your wife? Godard invents yet another, now standard film idea, the
moral curmudgeon: is my significant other a commodity.

Jack Palance leers over Brigitte and certainly, he has enough Hollywood
bucks to install her in his bedroom. In fact, he has enough bucks to
turn a work of art into a mass produced clich�. Skin sells in Peoria.
Palance is printing dollars as he screens films for rubes, but what of
true artists as say, Fritz Lang, the director that made the silent
classic M. Lang works around Palance's interference. He must finish
what he begins. He will not work for the Third Reich, but will work for
Louis Mayer.

Godard works his camera interiors for lengthy, banal conversation
between husband and naked wife. Bardot is beautiful and Godard takes
every opportunity to look at her, sharing with the voyeurs. The star
seems quite comfortable clothed or not. She also looks fine on a
Riviera mansion of the Bauhaus architecture overlooking the
Mediterranean. This is the sea of the Odyssey, which is the film within
a film. Alternatively, should I say there is a production within a
film.

Fickle Baby Brigitte
To start with I found this movie agonizingly slow. I fast-forwarded several scenes. However, it stayed with me, and I've had another try. I still fast-forwarded some of the scenes, but lingered longer on some of the others. It seems to me that Godard oozes contempt for everything and everyone involved with this picture, including the picture itself, except, possibly, Fritz Lang. Lang is too old and too wise to be an object of Godard's scorn. Godard appears to me to despise Hollywood, Hollywood producers, Hollywood films, his own producer, nude starlets, the film industry, Cinemascope, remakes of classic texts, mercenary writers, melodramatic cop-out endings, movie audiences, weak husbands and, especially, the type of wife who wants to have her cake and eat it. He also seems to feel contempt for himself --- but perhaps I'm reading too much into it all: the whole thing is perverse. I think his feeling towards the actors may be neutral, for want of a better word. At least, they seem to be giving him what he wants. Bardot gives a fine performance, imho, and so do the others: always supposing Palance is meant to be as wooden as he appears. The analysis of womanly logic in the apartment dialogue is deeply misogynistic, but also extremely accurate. I will give this film a third go, and watch it patiently all the way through, as I suspect it will reveal more as time goes by. But it is a sour piece of work, and I doubt whether I would upgrade it to 5 stars, although I've given 5 to worse films. It is thought-provoking, but the thoughts it provokes are not welcome. Nor do they seem to me worthwhile. The shots of the Greek statues are great.

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