Contempt (Le Mépris) November 26, 2004

With Contempt, Godard came closer (on the surface at least) to a Hollywood film with a more conventional narrative structure, mogul producers, vivid primary colors on a wide screen, and an international cast that included Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance, Michel Piccoli, and even Fritz Lang. A wife's increasing contempt for her scriptwriter husband and the husband's efforts to determine the source of her scorn--set against a backdrop of producing a movie version of Homer's Odyssey--constitute the plot. The film's achievement, suggests critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, is that it "presented a compelling way of thinking about the world--combining the whole complicated business of shooting a movie with reflections on antiquity and modernity, love and filmmaking, sound and image, art and commerce, thought and emotion..." (1963, 103 minutes).

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