Contempt

Jean Luc-Godard’s biggest popular success has been praised in some quarters as the greatest European artwork of the 20th century. We wish we liked it that much. To us, the film’s narrative weaknesses overpower its good points, and what others call iconoclastic genius, we call stubborn mulishness. Still, warts and all, Godard changed the direction of cinema as an art form. His 1960s New Wave work, among which Contempt is front and center, helped set off the wave of experimentalism that marked the decade. If you think Jean-Luc Godard is the captain of the starship Enterprise, it’s time to brush up on your film history. (And maybe your Star Trek lore too.) Contempt is several things at once: a self-consciously recursive film about filmmaking that casts the great German director Fritz Lang as himself. A recasting of The Odyssey with sneering film producer Jack Palance as a modern Cyclops. A study of the disintegration of a marriage, as Brigitte Bardot realizes she cannot trust her screenwriter husband Michel Piccoli. It’s beautifully shot (did we mention Bardot?), and this DVD showcases Raoul Coutard’s exquisite cinematography especially well. The colors are revitalized, and the image is back in its proper Cinemascope wide aspect—which makes a big difference despite Godard’s own sabotage by deliberately placing characters outside the frame. (There’s also a rich supply of supplemental material, the most interesting of which is an hour-long conversation about filmmaking between Godard and Lang.) Godard revelled in willful obscurity. In fact, after Contempt he turned his back on big-budget producers, preferring to make small films in which he was answerable to no one but his own muse.