Original title: Contempt
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang
France/Italy 1963 | colour | 103mins | Drama
Avaliable on: DCP
A sumptuously stylish study of a rocky marriage and fraught professional relationships, Godard’s unusually straightforward adaptation of a novel by Moravia is also his most hauntingly beautiful films.
A scriptwriter (Piccoli) adapting Homer’s Odyssey is torn between the demands of a philistine producer (Palance), his loyalty to the director (Lang) and his own self-respect; to make matters worse, his indecision is getting to his wife (Bardot)... Making the most of Raoul Coutard’s luscious ’Scope images and Georges Delerue’s achingly lovely score, Godard ensures that we care about this troubled couple even as he illuminates, with incisive wit, the corrosive compromises often inherent in filmmaking. A monumental achievement which combines the classical with the radical.' – Geoff Andrew, BFI Senior programmer