Contempt (1963)

Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli
directed by Jean-Luc Godard

Bardot and Piccoli have a much-needed relationship chat.

I like films which are visually arresting, provocative, kind of jump at you. This is one of those.  I've always disliked Godard, simply because he seems to be a not-very-nice person, and this comes across in his films, but all the stuff he did in the sixties was very good.

The CinemaScope photography is very beautiful, and there are a lot of random montages of statues of Greek gods, and the landscape of Capri.  Piccoli and Lang drop a lot of lines which seem symbolical, but which are ultimately nothing but fluff.  The pseudo-intellectual discussion in the middle stopped me in my tracks a second as I tried to imagine what Lang really meant, and what Godard was really trying to say, but it turned out to be nothing very important at all, nothing but some silly rationalizing for some pretty silly behavior.  Generally speaking, it's a superficial movie; aesthetically pleasing, but not very deep.

It often seems to be that 'the point' of Godard is to piss us off.  He makes some pretty absurd statements about American businessmen in the first twenty minutes.  And then, Piccoli's writer character, Javal, does some pretty silly things, which the film community still argues over to this day.  The trouble is, it's not sensible, and there's not 'a point'.  Godard is playing with our emotional reactions in a crude way; we're supposed to feel certain things, but we're not supposed to understand the film as a logical whole.  It's a weird medium between thinking a little, but then not too much.  I've wondered sometimes if Godard weren't mocking the literati elite; you could pontificate about this one for hours, and yet not say anything really meaningful.

Bardot turns in the best performance of the lot.  She's a much better actress than we give her credit for; we're too often distracted by her status as a sex symbol.

It's a frustrating movie at times, but perhaps this is on purpose.  Unlike many film critics, I think that attempting a big-budget, "American" style production was a brilliant decision on Godard's part; it emphasizes his strengths as a remarkable visual storyteller.  Perhaps under-appreciated upon it's release, Contempt has been enjoying a deserved second look from cinephiles over the past couple of years.