adrianawebuhm It is the soundtrack of Georges Delerue that I believe takes Le Mepris up onto another level. Otherwise I can't explain why I'm so moved by simple shots of sculptures. With the music soaring in the air with it, everything is complete with sound meeting visual.Godard and the team should still be given full credit for the choice of this soundtrack that drives the film. Though, Godard has mentioned that this was his highest budget film, and perhaps the one where he had the least power. Nevertheless, what an amazing film! In every film you sometimes have to allow other artists to make their own and its the team work on Contempt that makes it so strong. There's legendary Metropolis director Lang, and it would help for Godard to rub shoulders with such greats. Le Mepris is created like an epic in relationships, the breakdown of relationships. It's not done in a normal way, you have the typical long conversation you'd find in a Godard movie. Similar to what you'd find in Breathless, but less funny this time. It is a much more serious Godard film, which also owes a lot to the exquisite cinematography and the beautiful locations in Capri. A standout scene for me is the montage when the writer and his girlfriend are separated by the producer, who drives away with her in his car. The best moment is when they're all together again and you see an assistant arriving on a bicycle. The way all these pieces come together, is brilliant editing. Bravo to Le Mepris!

framptonhollis 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.

arfdawg-1 The Plot.Paul Javal is a writer who is hired to make a script for a new movie about Ulysses more commercial, which is to be directed by Fritz Lang and produced by Jeremy Prokosch. But because he let his wife Camille drive with Prokosch and he is late, she believes, he uses her as a sort of present for Prokosch to get get a better payment. So the relationship ends.This genre of self absorbed film-making went out of style 40 years ago. And it shows. It's very dated.The Technicolor and CinemaScope are cool but the movie is not engaging. And the music drags.BUT...there's Bridgette Bardot's ass. OMG. Perfection a la mode. What happened to her? She turned to dogs for love and turned into a fat old hag.

broken-stairs 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.