"Brilliant, romantic and genuinely tragic. It's also one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of moviemaking."
     - Martin Scorsese

"Godard's radiant, ambiguous, serenely perverse CONTEMPT is being revived again, in startling color and elegant, ribbony CinemaScope, for the second time in just over a decade, and it's beginning to look like one of those movies we can't do without for very long: a classic."
     - Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times

"The ravishing new print brightens the glow of greatness that has surrounded CONTEMPT ever since it first appeared in 1963. It is not simply an acid satire on filmmaking, and a cruel act of worship toward the myth of Bardot, but a larger look at the way in which we helplessly cast others as the unwilling co-stars in our own lives."
     - Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

With his aptly titled CONTEMPT, Jean-Luc Godard embraced the widescreen splendor of Hollywood while thumbing his nose at Hollywood itself. A rebel with a cause, Godard pursues an iconoclast's agenda, using the Franscope format (expertly controlled by cinematographer Raoul Coutard) to undermine the grandeur of widescreen melodramas. The story ostensibly concerns an innovative production of Homer's Odyssey and the struggle of a respected screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) to please a pugnacious producer (Jack Palance), a veteran director (Fritz Lang, essentially playing himself), and a petulant wife (Brigitte Bardot) who's grown tired of their turbulent relationship. It's all pretense, however, for Godard's mischievous (and yes, contemptuous) deconstruction of commercial Hollywood filmmaking, potently infused with film-buff in-jokes, astute observations about love, stardom, and artistry, and enough glossy style to suggest that Godard had mastered the craft he so willfully rejects. CONTEMPT is one of his most accessibly fascinating films.
— Jeff Shannon

DIR Jean-Luc Godard; SCR Jean-Luc Godard, based on the novel by Alberto Moravia; PROD Georges de Beauregard, Carlo Ponti, Joseph E. Levine. France/Italy, 1963, color, 103 min. In English, French, German and Italian with English subtitles. NOT RATED.

No passes accepted.