Jean-Luc Godard – Le mépris aka Contempt (1963)
Quote:
“C’est un film simple sur des choses compliquées”, this is how J.L. Godard once described Le mépris : “It’s a simple film about complicated things.”
I. “Totalement, tendrement, tragiquement”
II Cinecittà, “All kinds of real human beings.”
III. Prokosch’s villa in Rome – “About the money and your wife”
IV. In the appartment – “I’m not going, I’m not going”
V. In the theater (where one sells lies)
VI. Capri – “I have to know why you despise me”
VII. “Adieu”
VIII. Ithaque – “Silenzio!”
Totally, Tenderly, Tragically by Phillip Lopate wrote:
Contempt, one of Jean-Luc Godard’s greatest masterpieces, has a stately air that breaks with the filmmaker’s earlier, throwaway, hit-and-run manner, as though he were this time allowing himself to aim for cinematic sublimity. It is both his richest study of human relations, and a film very much about a tortured kind of movie love. The film has inspired passionate praise—Sight & Sound critic Colin MacCabe may have gone slightly overboard in dubbing Contempt “the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe,” but I would say it belongs in the running. It has certainly influenced a generation of filmmakers, including R.W. Fassbinder, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese (who paid his own homage by quoting from the Godard film’s stark, plangent musical score in Casino, and cosponsoring its re-release). Scorsese has called Contempt “brilliant, romantic and genuinely tragic,” adding that “It’s also one of the greatest films ever made about the actual process of filmmaking.”
In 1963, film buffs were drooling over the improbable news that Godard—renowned for his hit-and-run, art house bricolages such as Breathless and My Life to Live—was shooting a big CinemaScope color movie with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, based on an Alberto Moravia novel, The Ghost at Noon. It sounded almost too good to be true. Then word leaked out that Godard was having problems with his producers, Carlo Ponti and Joseph E. Levine (the distributor of Hercules and other schlock), who were upset that the rough cut was so chaste. Not a single nude scene with B.B.—not even a sexy costume! Godard obliged by adding a prologue of husband and wife (Michel Piccoli and Bardot) in bed, which takes inventory of that sumptuous figure through color filters, while foreshadowing the couple’s fragility: when she asks for reassurance about each part of her body, he reassures her ominously, “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”
Beyond that “compromise,” Godard refused to budge, saying: “Hadn’t they ever bothered to see a Godard film?”
Le mepris - Jean-Luc Godard (1963) [4K restoration 2023].mkv General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 43 min Size: 3.13 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 1024x436 Aspect ratio: 2.35:1 Frame rate: 24.000 fps Bit rate: 3 852 kb/s BPP: 0.359 Audio #1: French 1.0ch FLAC @ 208 kb/s (Original audio mono) #2: English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Commentary by Robert Stam)
Language(s):French (main), English, German, Italian
Subtitles:English, German, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese
I didn’t know there had been a 4K restoration of this last year. C’est formidable!
Very fitting that this should have been restored so soon after JLG’s death. His masterpiece, I think.
It looks glorious in this version, thank you.