Critics reviews

Everything is separation: between image and sound in dubbed movies, between mankind today and in The Odyssey, between wholeness and Godardian fragmentation, between integrity and corruption, between lovers drifting apart.

A prescient exercise in meta, this brilliant movie traces the deterioration of a screenwriter's marriage, which parallels the film based on The Odyssey (directed by Fritz Lang, suavely playing himself) that the writer is hired to rewrite. Here love brings out the worst machinations in people, as Georges Delerue's elegiac score strikes a moving and unsettling juxtaposition of the exaltation and meanness of human life.

It’s a very gloomy version of the story, though, and all the gloomier for being shot in bright colour and ample CinemaScope... It must be the most boring and ill-organised marital dispute in the history of film: a masterpiece of representation if realism is your only criterion.

I first saw Le Mépris many years ago in a print so faded that everything was pale pink; it felt like gazing at an artefact from an immeasurably distant past. Watching the film now, with its reds and Mediterranean blues restored to their full intensity, the film is still redolent of a lost antiquity, not least because Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 feature is so steeped in melancholy and a sense of mourning.

The film is self-reflexive in several ways. Godard’s marriage to muse Anna Karina was flagging, he was battling American investors... He was also tasked with making a commercial feature while maintaining its Godard-ness. He succeeded on all fronts. Godard was the artist who tore cinema apart and rebuilt it to suit his own interests and ends.

It’s a self-referential movie, a film whose deconstructive gaze is turned on itself, especially on the mechanics of sexual allure – as in Bardot’s famous speech, enumerating the charms of her naked body. Uncompromising, uningratiating film-making.

it is a full and immensely satisfying work, its tensions and teasing contradictions, moral, cinematic and intellectual, making it as exhilarating, alive and modern a film as any... The repeated motifs and melodies themselves combine, as does the movie, the classical and the modern, deepenening the meanings and the mixed emotions of defiance and nostalgia that make Le Mépris so very affecting and – a word Godard would be proud of – so very beautiful.

Godard’s genius is such that he manages to infuse what he considered to be artistic compromise with enough melancholy, cynicism and wit that the film still stands amongst his finest work.

It’s tough to know what’s sincere and what’s not: wry observation and heartfelt emotion are totally entangled. Moreover, it would be wrong to see ‘Le Mépris’ as just a comment on filmmaking, or even a satire of it... Like Camille and Paul’s love-hate relationship, it’s the ultimate testament to Godard’s complicated relationship with his art.

[Contempt is] possibly Godard's most melancholy film and probably his most beautiful... As romantic tragedies go, Contempt is a near-perfect sphere, an exploration of the cosmos of sadness that can open up between a man and a woman, between a living room, a bedroom, and beyond...

Contempt fully earns every possible interpretation of its bold title, as Godard commits the ultimate act of artistic bravery, refuting everything he's embraced or known, saying by implication that, "I can do better. I can be more. I can be purer."

All the films that Jean-Luc Godard made in the 1960s are readily rewatchable for their infectious, trailblazing energy, but CONTEMPT also possesses a magisterial authority that anticipates the poetry of his awesome late period.